move-a-list-of-files-to-another-directory.md

Move A List Of Files To Another Directory

Let's say I have some command I run (it doesn't matter what it is) that produces a list of files I want to deal with. For instance, how about all the markdown files in some directory -- fd -e md . docs.

Whatever that list of files is, I want to move them to another directory. To do that I can pipe the list to mv via xargs. The built-in mv command on MacOS can take a list of one or more source files followed by a single target directory. So I need xargs to inject the filename for the current line being processed into the middle of each mv that gets executed.

❯ fd -e md . docs | xargs -IFILE mv FILE ../target/dir
# essentially:
# mv docs/file1.md ../target/dir
# mv docs/file2.md ../target/dir
# mv docs/file3.md ../target/dir

The -I flag lets me define a token (e.g. FILE) that represents a line from the source input. I can then inject that token anywhere in the command that xargs is evaluating. This mv command gets run once for each line (that is, each file name) from the source input.

A slightly easier way to approach this if I have GNU CoreUtils installed is to use their version of mv (which will be gmv for me) which has the -t flag. With that form, I can specify the target directory first with -t and then xargs can naturally inject all the file names from the source input at the end of the line.

❯ fd -e md . docs | xargs gmv -t ../target/dir
# essentially:
# gmv -t ../target/dir docs/file1.md docs/file2.md docs/file3.md

See man xargs as well as man mv and man gmv for more details.