I've enountered this situation on multiple systems....

On a particular server there are image files strung about the webroot directory structure....example

/wwwroot/605/cf/fblahblah/images/OLD_fiserwringn616.jpg
/wwwroot/205/gnd/blahhdf/image1/dr3/ghhd/OLD_blhja43newone.gif
/wwwroot/sd/234/45554/sdfgsdfsg/whatever/whateverelse/in/more/directories/forever/OLD_2335435.jpg

all the image files are in the OLD_*.extension naming scheme. I'm needing to move ALL 600+ like this to one backup directory. I have considered several ways of doing this, but Im under HUGE time constraints. I was wondering if anyone had done this before and if they could offer advice or script concepts for it.

Please help me. I'm under a lot of pressure.

also....I tried a string similar to this.....maybe I'm close....

find /home/joe *.exe | grep *.exe | mv '{print1}' /home/joe/exe

this is an example.....

Im trying to take the output from find and mv line-by-line that content to /home/joe/exe....it errors out...but am I close in concept?

If all the files aren't in the same sub directory, then you probably want to make use of xargs it will take the output of some command and use that as arguments to another command.

Something along the lines of:
find /path -name "OLD_*.jpg" | xargs -i % mv % /newpath/

Should be what you're after.

you pointed me in the right direction thank you so much!!!!

xargs....I must remember this.

For a linux system...this is the command string I passed:

find /home/joe -name "*.exe" | xargs -i mv {} exe/directoryforallexes/

For a Solaris system....this is the command string I passed:

find /wwwroot/allthestuff -name "*OLD_*.*" | xargs -I {} -t mv {} /wwwroot/oldstuffonly/

solaris has a slighty different way of requesting the output AND how you tell the shell what you're trying to do, but I figured it out in minutes instead of hours. THANKS AGAIN!!!!

Also. I was wondering what you study for BSD. I spend a great deal of time reading Oreilly publications but I'm really diving into BSD bigtime.

The respective website, and the man pages. Seriously, unlike any other OS I've ever used (Windows, Solaris, Linux, etc) the documentation for each BSD is really good. The man pages usually give you working examples of how to use a command or utility. Also, there is a huge amount of documentation found on the website for each BSD (well, Free, Net, and Open any way) that is extremely helpful.

In my free time I read Absolute BSD and Absolute OpenBSD, both by Michael Lucas. They weren't literary master pieces, but they were pretty helpful. Building Secure Arcitectures with OpenBSD by [whoops, book not in front of me and I've forgotten] is also quite good.

An excellent book to look into for Unix-based command line terminology is QUE - Think Unix. I have it, and teaches you little tricks like this all over the book. Highly reccomended.

xargs is a excellent utility must read up more on this

also the is a -exec option in find, such that....

find /<path> -name '<pattern>' -exec mv{} <new_path> \; -print