I'd like to create links of books.
Firstly, I collect all the JS books
find ~ -type f -iregex -Eo '.*javascript.*\.pdf' > js_books.md 2>/dev/null
It returns 35 books
../Coding/Books/HTML_Collections/Freeman E.T., Robson E. - Head First HTML5. Programming Building Web Apps with JavaScript - 2011.pdf
../Coding/Books/HTML_Collections/Learning Web Design - A Beginner's Guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web Graphics - Jennifer Niederst Robbins - 4th Edition - August 2012.pdf
..
Additionally to copy them to directory js_books
mkdir js_books
find ~ -type f -iregex -Eo '.*javascript.*\.pdf' print0 -exec cp '{}' js_books
It works, however, multiple copies consume lots of disk space.
So I delete the books and try to make symbolic link within.
find ~ -type f -iregex '.*javascript.*\.pdf' -print0 -exec ln -s '{}' js_books/'{}' \;
It returns nothing in dir js_books.
How to work out such a problem?
Sorry again. I don't have access to BSD ln at the moment, but I would assume that '{}' contains the full path, and doing '{}' js_books/'{}' should get you something like /home/.../file js_books//home/.../file, which is of course nonsense.
In my version of ln, I don't even need to specify the -t option, i.e., the following command works:
find ~ -type f -name "*.pdf" -exec ln -s {} js_books \;
If this doesn't work for you, try using basename to get the file name without the path:
find ~ -type f -name "*.pdf" -exec sh -c 'ln -s "{}" "temp/$(basename "{}")"' \;
Sorry. Previous answer didn't work so well.
Instead, try using full paths for both source and destination.
For reference, the previous answer was:
Use ln's -t option:
-t, --target-directory=DIRECTORYspecify the DIRECTORY in which to create the links
So your command becomes find ~ -type f -iregex '.*javascript.*\.pdf' -print0 -exec ln -s -t js_books/ '{}' \;