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Fancy Mac OS X command line tricks

A reader writes:

"I figured that this would be right up your alley. If I want to move any document that contains "agreen" to another folder, what commands would I use on the command line?"

Dave's Answer: Hmmm.... let's see...

find . -print | xargs grep -il "agreen"

would produce a list of all files from the current point in the file system "down" (e.g., within this subdirectory), so wrap that in a for loop and you have something like:

target="~/newdir"
for name in $(find . -print | xargs grep -il "agreen") do echo moving file $name to $target mv $name $target done

You'll want to make sure that 'newdir' exists first, or the 'mv' will successively step on and remove all of your files. Maybe a safer snippet would be:

target="~/newdir" if [ ! -d $target ] ; then echo "Failed: target directory $target not found." 2>1 exit 1 fi for name in $(find . -print | xargs grep -il "agreen") do echo moving file $name to $target mv $name $target done

There! That should do the trick.

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Categorized: Mac OS X Help (Article 3654)
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Comments

-print????

Why? It's pointless. Banish it from your mind.

How about this? It works fine for reasonable values of x:

for x in `find . -exec grep -l agreen {} \;`
> do
> mv -i $x /tmp/agreen.files/
> done

Commentary:
I leave off the -i option to grep as that wasn't asked for (I'm such a pedant!).

I add a -i option to mv because if there are 5 different files found that all have the same name, you may not want to end up with just the last one.

Notice my use of a trailing / on the directory name. If the directory doesn't exist, you just get error(s). Example:
# mv .CFUserTextEncoding nonexistantdirectory/
mv: rename .CFUserTextEncoding to nonexistantdirectory/: No such file or directory

To explain the form I am using, putting commands in back ticks makes the shell evaluate that command first and put its output in the command's place. This also means it finds all the filenames THEN acts on them, preventing the situation where the file is found again after being moved.

Posted by: Brian Excarnate at February 21, 2007 10:11 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!