I'm trying to copy all the files in one partition to a folder in another partition. I want all the files that have a certain phrase in the file name to be copied. for instance: I want all files with 'school' in the file name to be copied to the folder /home/backups/school. what command would work best for this?

I was thinking something like this:

find|grep school| cp (stdout) /home/backups/school

but my problem is that I don't know how to manipulate the stdout to be placed in that position. any ideas?

you don't need grep, find can do pattern matching with -name or -iname arg. something like: 'find /path -iname '*school*' -exec cp /home/backups/school "{}" ";"'

I am trying to enter this command into the shell as a bash command. the format you gave doesn't work.

please be specific. i'm relatively new...

I suggest you to use the command xargs.
Then you would have something like this:
--> find | grep school | xargs -n1 -i cp -r {} /home/backups/school

The curly braces mean for every argument you get to the pipe.

BTW infamous41md: -name does not search for a string inside a file, but searches a file that conatins in its name that string (-iname is the same but for case insensitive).

he said "a certain phrase in the filename", and the example i gave did just that. quantus, the command i gave works fine. maybe u copied it wrong. i suggest reading the man page find, type 'man find' [enter].

Oops, sorry, you're right, i thought he was talking about searching inside the file. My fault.

ok, i copied the text exactly. and entered it into the shell prompt. all it did was bring me to the " > " prompt.


guys, my question was that is there any way to pipe the stdout into a command.

for instance, if {} were the way to pipe all stdout into a certain spot, then this command would retrieve all log files and copy them to a certain directory.

find / | grep .log|cp {} /logbackups/today


see? i'm trying to learn how to master the stdout manipulation. and i haven't found anything related to the above situation in any tutorial. thanks.

Why not just do cp -r /*school* /destination

yeah that's a great idea.
you might need /*school*.*

and add the -f flag to avoid any mass of annoying questions:

cp -f -r /mnt/(windows)/Documents\ and\ Settings/(user)/My\ Documents/*school*.* /dir/to/copy/to

replace appropiate stuff.
notice i escaped spaces with \

If u r trying to learn how to master the stdout manipulation, then u can use the following command:

$ find /path -iname '*school*.*' -exec cp "{}" /bkup_path ";"

Cheers,

rkdugar

that command is excellent. it worked wonders. with only one hitch. it doesn't respond well to spaces....

Program Files.....

any ideas how to pipe quotation marks before and after the stdout? would something like this work?


# find /mnt/C -iname '*school*.*' -exec cp /""{}"/" /home


???
because i'm sure it'd work if quotes could somehow be appended and prepended to the sdtout. thank you soo much for that last command.

The appended and prepended quotes to the sdtout will not solve ur purpose. You can try the following command:

# find /mnt/C -iname '*school*' -exec cp "{}" /home ";"


You can use the following comand, if u want to copy some selected files:

# find /mnt/C -iname '*school*' -ok cp "{}" /home ";"

It should work...and don't forget to give ";" at the end of the command.

Cheers,

rkdugar