Help please - cp and regex

[10PoundBrown]

Hi all, I have a very large directory of files of differing types and I need to seperate them based on file type. For example, I need to copy all of the pdfs into a temp directory. I tried this but got an error
unix-shell:# cp *.pdf temp_pdf_dir/
bash: /bin/cp: Argument list too long

Can anyone help me, Im new to regular expressions and am not having any luck.

Thanks in advance

 

[PHV]

Try something like this:
echo *.pdf | while read pdf
do cp "$pdf" temp_pdf_dir
done


Hope This Help, PH.
Want to get great answers to your Tek-Tips questions? Have a look at FAQ219-2884

 

[aigles]

If you get the same error with the PHV solution, try :
[tt]
find \( ! -name . -prune \) \( -name '*.pdf' -print \) | while read pdf
do
cp $pdf temp_pdf_dir/
done
[/tt]

Jean Pierre.

 

[vgersh99]

or:

ls *.pdf | xargs cp {} temp_pdf_dir/

vlad
+----------------------------+
| #include<disclaimer.h> |
+----------------------------+

 

[PHV]

vgersh99, I guess you'll raise this:
bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long

Hope This Help, PH.
Want to get great answers to your Tek-Tips questions? Have a look at FAQ219-2884

 

[10PoundBrown]

Thanks to all for their input. cp was dying because the list of pdf files was too great to it puked and died. This is the command I eventually came up with.

find . -iname '*.pdf' -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 cp --target-directory=temp_pdf_dir/

Thanks again to all that helped out. Your the best.