On Sun, 25 Sep 2005 at 6:52pm, Kai wrote
> Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
>>
>> *However*, that will keep the directory structure. Why not just use cp?
>>
>> find ../ -name '*.mp3' -o -name '*.ogg' -print0 | xargs -0 -i cp \{} .
>>
> Thank you for explaining, cp would be find, but I don't understand your
> arguments after the pipe.
> Please explain..
>
> I have tried to use find ....... -exec cp {}\; but cant get anything working
> using the cp in this type of command.
xargs takes whatever comes in stdin and puts in after the commands which
follow it. If you give 'xargs' the '-i' flag, it instead takes what comes
in on stdin and puts it whereever you put the '\{}' (note the location of
the \). 'find | xargs' is *much* faster than 'find -exec' b/c you're not
spawning a new process for every hit. The '-print0' to find and '-0' to
xargs use nulls to delimit each entry rather than whitespace -- this lets
the command work on files/directory names with spaces in them.
--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University