How to pipe the results of 'find' to mv in Linux

Question

How do I pipe the results of a 'find' (in Linux) to be moved to a different directory? This is what I have so far.

find ./ -name '*article*' | mv ../backup 

but its not yet right (I get an error missing file argument, because I didn't specify a file, because I was trying to get it from the pipe)

Answer 1

find ./ -name '*article*' -exec mv {}  ../backup  \; 

OR

find ./ -name '*article*' | xargs -I '{}' mv {} ../backup 

Answer 2

xargs is commonly used for this, and mv on Linux has a -t option to facilitate that.

find ./ -name '*article*' | xargs mv -t ../backup 

If your find supports -exec ... \+ you could equivalently do

find ./ -name '*article*' -exec mv -t ../backup {}  \+ 

The -t option is a GNU extension, so it is not portable to systems which do not have GNU coreutils (though every proper Linux I have seen has that, with the possible exception of Busybox). For complete POSIX portability, it's of course possible to roll your own replacement, maybe something like

find ./ -name '*article*' -exec sh -c 'mv "$@" "$0"' ../backup {} \+ 

where we shamelessly abuse the convenient fact that the first argument after sh -c 'commands' ends up as the "script name" parameter in $0 so that we don't even need to shift it.