I want to copy all the files in a directory that were modified this month. I can list those files like this:
ls -l * | grep Jul
And then to copy them I was trying to pipe the result into cp via xargs but had no success (I think) because I couldn't figure out how to parse the ls -l output to just grab the filename for cp.
I'm sure there are many ways of doing this; I'll give the correct answer out to the person who can show me how to parse ls -l in this manner (or talk me down from that position) though I'd be interested in seeing other methods as well.
Thanks!
Of course, just doing grep Jul is bad because you might have files with Jul in their name.
Actually, find is probably the right tool for your job. Something like this:
find $DIR -maxdepth 1 -type f -mtime -30 -exec cp {} $DEST/ \;
where $DIR is the directory where your files are (e.g. '.') and $DEST is the target directory.
The -maxdepth 1 flag means it doesn't look inside sub-directories for files (isn't recursive)
The -type f flag means it looks only at regular files (e.g. not directories)
The -mtime -30 means it looks at files with modification time newer than 30 days (+30 would be older than 30 days)
the -exec flag means it executes the following command on each file, where {} is replaced with the file name and \; is the end of the command