How to move output of find command to another directory?

I want the output of this command find /home -name *.pdf to move the files in the search result to another directory, e.g. with a pipe. How can I do that?

2 Answers

You don't need any pipe-ing, and xargs to make the filenames as arguments for mv.

Just use mv within the -exec action of find:

find /home -type f -name '*.pdf' -exec mv -t /destination {} + 

• Replace /destination with the actual destination directory
• find will handle all possible filenames
• find will handle ARG_MAX by passing as many filenames in one go so that does not trigger ARG_MAX
• If you are looking for only files (presumably in this case), limit the search vector by adding -type f
• Quote the glob expansion, '*.pdf', so that shell does not expand them beforehand as find will handle them

If for some weird reason, or for learning purpose, you must use pipe-xargs:

find /home -type f -name '*.pdf' -print0 | xargs -0 mv -t /destination 

If you don't have spaces in the names of your pdf's, another way to do it is to run this command in your terminal:

mv $(find /home -type f -name '*.pdf') ./destination

The $() applies the output from the command run (find /home -type f -name '*.pdf') to the command outside of it (mv [...] ./destination).