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Negrito
Asked: 2020-01-01 19:49:35 +0800 CST

How to copy/move files with more than two keywords

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I have a file list like this (long list, not all):

enter image description here And I want to filter the files with keywords "QM" and ".h5", so I type ls|grep "QM"|grep "h5" and it shows these (what I need) enter image description here

So basically I want to move these files to another directory, but I don't know how to move them with one line of script.

Also, is there a way to randomly choose 5 of these files and copy them to another directory?

grep copy

3 Answers

  1. "Many files"? "Files with funny characters in their name"?

    This calls for find and xargs!

    Read man find;man xargs and do something like:

    find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*QM*.h5' -print0 |\
  xargs -0 --no-run-if-empty mv --target-directory=AnotherDirectory

    Note: "AnotherDirectory" must already exist.

    Note: See what the results will be by initaiily replacing "mv" with "echo mv".

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  2. Best Answer

    Shell globs are going to be your friends here.

    For example, instead of using grep, you can list all files whose names contain QM and end with .h5 using

    ls *QM*.h5

    You can use globs in mv and cp operations provided that the number of matching files is not too large

    cp *QM*.h5 path/to/new_dir/

    If the number of files is too large, you may get an argument list too long error; you can work around that using the shell's printf builtin with xargs to break the copy into manageable chunks:

    printf '%s\0' *QM*.h5 | xargs -0 cp -t path/to/new_dir/

    With bash, there's no intrinsic way to limit the number of files selected (or to select a random subset) but you could do so by adding a call to shuf:

    printf '%s\0' *QM*.h5 | shuf -zn5 | xargs -0 cp -t path/to/new_dir/

    Note that I used the null byte \0 instead of the newline character to delimit the list of filenames - that's not necessary in your case, but makes the command usable in the more general case where filenames themselves may contain newlines.

    If you don't mind switching to the z shell zsh, then you can select a random subset without resorting to external utilities, using the shell's more expressive glob qualifiers:

    cp -t path/to/new_dir/ *QM*.h5(Nnoe['REPLY=$RANDOM'][1,5])        # zsh only

    Related question on our Unix & Linux sister site:

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  3. Just cp *QM*.h5 target_dirand done.

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