How to copy files found with grep

bash grep pipe cp
user6372336 picture user6372336 · May 23, 2016 · Viewed 16.2k times · Source

I am running this command to find all my files that contain (with help of regex)"someStrings" in a tree directory.

grep -lir '^beginString' ./ -exec cp -r {} /home/user/DestinationFolder \;

It found files like this:

FOLDER
a.txt
-->SUBFOLDER
  a.txt
---->SUBFOLDER
     a.txt

I want to copy all files and folder, with the same schema, to the destination folder, but i don't know how to do it. It's important copy files and folder, because several files found has the same name and I need to keep it.

Answer

F. Hauri picture F. Hauri · May 23, 2016

Try this:

find . -type f -exec grep -q '^beginString' {} \; -exec cp -t /home/user/DestinationFolder {} +

or

grep -lir '^beginString' . | xargs cp -t /home/user/DestinationFolder

But if you want to keep directory structure, you could:

grep -lir '^beginString' . | tar -T - -c | tar -xpC /home/user/DestinationFolder

or if like myself, you prefer to be sure about kind of file you store (only file, no symlinks), you could:

find . -type f -exec grep -l '^beginString' {} + | tar -T - -c |
    tar -xpC /home/user/DestinationFolder

and if your files names could countain spaces and/or special characters, use null terminated strings for passing grep -l output (arg -Z) to tar -T (arg --null -T):

find . -type f -exec grep -lZ '^beginString' {} + | tar --null  -T - -c |
    tar -xpC /home/user/DestinationFolder

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