Hi. I'd like to move a selection of files from all the sub-directories within an overall directory to a single destination. I don't want any of the directory structure, just the files themselves. This is what I tried so far:

mv /dir1/*/igs*.sp3.Z /dir2

There are other .sp3.Z files in the * directories within /dir1 but I just need the ones that start with igs...

Thanks, Alex

Hi,
you forgot to tell what output gave that command.
Another way to do it would be with "find" that look for files and them mv them with -exec command.

Try:

$ find /dir1/ -name igs*sp3.Z | xargs -n1 -i mv {} <path to destination directory>

Thanks Kilgore, that worked well for me. Now I just need to understand what it meant....

It's simpler than it looks. The first part is just the find command where find is asked to look in /dir1 for for all files with the requested pattern in their name(find /dir1/ -name igs*sp3.Z). If you ran just this part find would spit out every file with that pattern in dir1 and all of dir1's subdirectories. Note, find will search recursively by default so it looks in dir1 and all subdirectories of dir1. The next part uses the pipe command, "|", which takes the output of find and pipes it to the second command "xargs" for further processing. xargs receives the ouput from find and takes the files outputted one at a time(-n1) and sends that output to the curly braces,{} where the mv command sequentially acts on that input and moves the filenames received one at a time to the destination directory.