I am trying to find files that match a certain pattern and then copy just those files to another directory.

So far I have this, which find the files that match my pattern but I can't figure out how to then copy those to another directory.

find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -name "*" -exec grep -l "pattern" {} \;


I have tried adding
find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -name "*" -exec grep -l "pattern" -exec cp /directory {} \;



but that fails.

I've also tried a script which fails:

#!/bin/bash
for i in find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -name "*" -exec grep -l "pattern" {} \;
do
cp $i directory
done



but all that does is copy ALL the files into the new directory







edit:


cheap and dirty way that I figured out:


#!/bin/bash
find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -name "*" -exec grep -l "pattern" {} \; >> filename

for b in `cat filename`
do
cp $b test
done

Why are you passing the “-l” flag to grep? What you want is for grep to exit with success if the pattern is found and exit with failure if the pattern is not found. If a success is encountered, then the remaining arguments to find are processed. Also, your cp syntax is backwards.

Try something like this:

thanks

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec grep -q "pattern" '{}' ';' -exec cp '{}' /path ';'


worked, I didn't know how to pass 2 exec expressions on one line.


I used the -l because I wanted just the filename not the matching lines

Why use grep in the first place?

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -regex "pattern" -exec cp {} /directory \;

How about using xargs? Something like this.