Snafui.com - Find and Copy Example

Problem

I needed to recurse through a large series of folders and subfolders to find all .TIF files and copy them to a new directory.

Discussion

Initially I thought of using cp -R but I don't believe that'll be what I needed judging by the man page. Next thought was writing a script to do it, but if there's already a tool out there to do it.. then why?

Solution

I finally landed on using 'find' with it's -exec flag. Syntax is below:

find documents/ -name "*.TIF" -exec cp {} test/ \;

This allowed me to recurse the documents/ directory (with roughly 6800 subdirectories), find .TIF files and copy them to the test/ directory. The {} token is a special 'find' token to mean "the file that was found" with its path relative to the directory where you executed the find command.