I have a working grep command that selects files meeting a certain condition. How can I take the selected files from the grep command and pipe it into a cp command?
The following attempts have failed on the cp end:
grep -r "TWL" --exclude=*.csv* | cp ~/data/lidar/tmp-ajp2/ cp: missing destination file operand after ‘/home/ubuntu/data/lidar/tmp-ajp2/’ Try 'cp --help' for more information.
cp `grep -r "TWL" --exclude=*.csv*` ~/data/lidar/tmp-ajp2/ cp: invalid option -- '7'
grep -l -r "TWL" --exclude=*.csv* | xargs cp -t ~/data/lidar/tmp-ajp2/ Explanation:
-l option to output file names only-t option to specify target directory (and avoid using placeholders)
-l option does not work for me. Aside from that, it works fine.
-t is said an illegal option for cp on macOS sierra.
you need xargs with the placeholder option:
grep -rl "TWL" --exclude=*.csv* | xargs -I '{}' cp '{}' ~/data/lidar/tmp-ajp2/ normally if you use xargs, it will put the output after the command, with the placeholder ('{}' in this case), you can choose the location where it is inserted, even multiple times.
This worked for me when searching for files with a specific date:
ls | grep '2018-08-22' | xargs -I '{}' cp '{}' ~/data/lidar/tmp-ajp2/ 
'{}' are placeholders for the results of the grep listing ls | grep. So in my case, the command listed all the files that match the given date in their filename, and then copied each file to a specific directory.To copy files to grep found directories, use -printf to output directories and -i to place the command argument from xarg (after pipe)
find ./ -name 'filename.*' -print '%h\n' | xargs -i cp copyFile.txt {} this copies copyFile.txt to all directories (in ./) containing "filename"
grep -rl '/directory/' -e 'pattern' | xargs cp -t /directory
