How to copy files from a folder using the find command with the -exec action, or with xargs, to another folder

Question

I'd like to use the find command with the -exec action with the plus (+) sign (for efficiency), or with xargs to copy files from one directory to another. The following answer did not work for me. I'm under bash version: 4.3.48(1). Trying:

find . \( \( -type f -size -2M \) -o \( -type f -size 2M \) \) -exec cp '{}' ~/Pictures/test_folder '+'

or:

find . \( -type f -size -2M \) -o \( -type f -size 2M \) | xargs cp -t ~/Pictures/test_folder 

does not work for me. Maybe I've made a syntactic error of some kind, but I've already tried several variations of the above commands and I still can't get it to work. The test folder is the location where I'd like the files to be copied to.

Answer 1

I'd expect this to work:

find . -type f \( -size -2M -o -size 2M \) -exec cp -t ~/Pictures/test_folder {} +

(I took out the common -type f test.)

With +, the {} is expected to be the last item in an -exec command. From the GNU find manual:

Only one {} is allowed within the command, and it must appear at the end, immediately before the +. A + appearing in any position other than immediately after {} is not considered to be special (that is, it does not terminate the command).

If you use find and xargs, remember to use the -print0 and -0 options:

find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cp -t ...

With -print0, filenames are delimited with the ASCII NUL character, the only one not allowed in paths. Without this, xargs could split filenames on spaces, so a ./file1 - foo.txt would be seen as ./file1, - and foo.txt by the cp command.