Moving files with an extension into a location

Question

How could I move all .txt files from a folder and all included folders into a target directory .

And preferably rename them to the folder they where included in, although thats not that important. I'm not exactly familiar with bash.

Answer 1

To recursively move files, combine find with mv.

find src/dir/ -name '*.txt' -exec mv -t target/dir/ -- {} + 

Or if on a UNIX system without GNU's version of find, such as macOS, use:

find src/dir/ -name '*.txt' -exec mv -- {} target/dir/ ';' 

To rename the files when you move them it's trickier. One way is to have a loop that uses "${var//from/to}" to replace all occurrences of from with to in $var.

find src/dir/ -name '*.txt' -print0 | while IFS= read -rd $'\0' file; do     mv -- "$file" target/dir/"${file//\//_}" done 

This is ugly because from is a slash, which needs to be escaped as \/.

See also:

• Unix.SE: Understanding IFS= read -r line
• BashFAQ: How can I read a file (data stream, variable) line-by-line (and/or field-by-field)?

Answer 2

Try this:

find source -name '*.txt' | xargs -I files mv files target 

This will work faster than any option with -exec, since it will not invoke a singe mv process for every file which needs to be moved.