How to avoid 'are the same file' warning message when using cp in Linux?

Question

I'm trying to copy certain files from one directory to another. Using this command

find "$HOME" -name '*.txt' -type f -print0 | xargs -0 cp -t $HOME/newdir 

I get an warning message saying

cp: '/home/me/newdir/logfile.txt' and '/home/me/newdir/logfile.txt' are the same file

How to avoid this warning message?

Answer 1

The problem is that you try to copy a file to itself. You can avoid it by excluding the destination directory from the results of the find command like this:

find "$HOME" -name '*.txt' -type f -not -path "$HOME/newdir/*" -print0 | xargs -0 cp -t "$HOME/newdir"  

Answer 2

try using install instead, this replaces by removing the file first.

install -v target/release/dynnsd-client target/ removed 'target/dynnsd-client' 'target/release/dynnsd-client' -> 'target/dynnsd-client' 

and then remove the source files