Pass Output as an Argument for Cp in Bash

pass output as an argument for cp in bash

It would be:

cp `ls -SF | grep -v / | head -5` Directory

assuming that the pipeline is correct. The backticks substitute in the line the output of the commands inside it.

You can also make your tests:

cp `echo a b c` Directory

will copy all a, b, and c into Directory.

How to pass output from sed into cp command?

Just use xargs

sed 's|<pattern>|<replace>|' file | xargs -i{} cp {} somewhere

How to pipe output from grep to cp?

grep -l -r "TWL" --exclude=*.csv* | xargs cp -t ~/data/lidar/tmp-ajp2/

Explanation:

• grep -l option to output file names only
• xargs to convert file list from the standard input to command line arguments
• cp -t option to specify target directory (and avoid using placeholders)

How to pass command output as multiple arguments to another command

You can use xargs:

grep 'pattern' input | xargs -I% cp "%" "%.bac"

How To Pass Find results to CP such that File Names with Spaces work

Try this:

find . -name \*.pdf -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 -Ifoo cp --parents foo /new_path/

Or

find . -name \*.pdf -exec cp --parents {} /new_path/ \;

bash: how to implement the output of 'wc -l' as an argument to another script

when passing file as standard input wc doesn't echo filename

wc -l < NRL.txt

Passing more than one argument through to a command in a shell wrapper

#!/bin/sh
cp -rf -- "$@" /support/save

Use "$@" to expand to your entire argument list. It is essential that this be placed in double-quotes, or else it will behave identically to $* (which is to say, incorrectly).

The -- is a widely implemented extension which ensures that all following arguments are treated as literal arguments rather than parsed as options, thus making filenames starting with - safe.

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To demonstrate the difference, name the following script quotdemo.

#!/bin/sh
printf '$@: '; printf '<%s>\n' "$@"
printf '$*: '; printf '[%s]\n' $*

...and try running:

touch foo.txt bar.txt "file with spaces.txt" # create some matching files
quotdemo *.txt    # ...then test this...
quotdome "*.txt"  # ...and this too!

Is it possible to pipe the results of FIND to a COPY command CP?

Good question!

1. why cant you just use | pipe? isn't that what its for?

You can pipe, of course, xargs is done for these cases:

find . -iname "*.SomeExt" | xargs cp Destination_Directory/

2. Why does everyone recommend the -exec

The -exec is good because it provides more control of exactly what you are executing. Whenever you pipe there may be problems with corner cases: file names containing spaces or new lines, etc.

3. how do I know when to use that (exec) over pipe | ?

It is really up to you and there can be many cases. I would use -exec whenever the action to perform is simple. I am not a very good friend of xargs, I tend to prefer an approach in which the find output is provided to a while loop, such as:

while IFS= read -r result
do
    # do things with "$result"
done < <(find ...)

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