Is it possible to pipe the results of FIND to a COPY command CP?

Question

Is it possible to pipe the results of find to a COPY command cp?

Like this:

find . -iname "*.SomeExt" | cp Destination Directory 

Seeking, I always find this kind of formula such as from this post:

find . -name "*.pdf" -type f -exec cp {} ./pdfsfolder \; 

This raises some questions:

1. Why cant you just use | pipe? isn't that what its for?
2. Why does everyone recommend the -exec
3. How do I know when to use that (exec) over pipe |?

Answer 1

Good question!

1. why cant you just use | pipe? isn't that what its for?

You can pipe, of course, xargs is done for these cases:

find . -iname "*.SomeExt" | xargs cp Destination_Directory/ 

2. Why does everyone recommend the -exec

The -exec is good because it provides more control of exactly what you are executing. Whenever you pipe there may be problems with corner cases: file names containing spaces or new lines, etc.

3. how do I know when to use that (exec) over pipe | ?

It is really up to you and there can be many cases. I would use -exec whenever the action to perform is simple. I am not a very good friend of xargs, I tend to prefer an approach in which the find output is provided to a while loop, such as:

while IFS= read -r result do     # do things with "$result" done < <(find ...) 

Answer 2

There's a little-used option for cp: -t destination -- see the man page:

find . -iname "*.SomeExt" | xargs cp -t Directory