Copying files containing specific text in its content from a folder to other

Question

At times I have come across a situation whereby I have to copy all the files containing a specific pattern in its content from a folder to another.

For example, DirA contains 100 files, out of which there are 60 files which contains a pattern FOO. My requirement is to copy these 60 files from DirA to DirB.

I typically write a small shell script to do this job and it works properly. However, I am trying to understand if there is a way to it only using a combination of some commands such that I need not write any shell script.

Answer 1

You can use

cp `grep -l 'FOO' dirA/*` dirB/

grep -l will only output the name of the files matching the pattern.