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linuxmacosunixcommand-linexargs

How can I use xargs to copy files that have spaces and quotes in their names?

I'm trying to copy a bunch of files below a directory and a number of the files have spaces and single-quotes in their names. When I try to string together find and grep with xargs, I get the following error:

find .|grep "FooBar"|xargs -I{} cp "{}" ~/foo/bar
xargs: unterminated quote

Any suggestions for a more robust usage of xargs?

This is on Mac OS X 10.5.3 (Leopard) with BSD xargs.

Solution

  • You can combine all of that into a single find command:

    find . -iname "*foobar*" -exec cp -- "{}" ~/foo/bar \;

    This will handle filenames and directories with spaces in them. You can use -name to get case-sensitive results.

    Note: The -- flag passed to cp prevents it from processing files starting with - as options.