How can I recursively copy all pdf files in a directory (and it's subdirectories) into a single output directory?

Question

I have a directory containing a large number of PDF files, some of which are in subdirectories (which can extend several layers deep). I would like to move all files matching *.pdf into a single output folder named papers.

How can I do this?

• Colonel Panic: How would you like to handle the case there are two files a/x.pdf and b/x.pdf?

Answer 1

If you use bash in a recent version, you can profit from the globstar option:

shopt -s globstar
mv **/*.pdf papers/

• Colonel Panic: Bash versions greater than 4.0-alpha wiki.bash-hackers.org/internals/shell_options#globstar

Answer 2

 find /bunchopdfs -name "*.pdf" -exec mv {} /papers \; 

Here's a test I did

$ ls -R
.:
a aaa bbb.pdf pdfs
./a:
foo.pdf
./pdfs:

Notice the file "aaa bbb.pdf".

$ find . -name "*pdf" -exec mv {} pdfs \;
$ ls -R
.:
a pdfs
./a:
./pdfs:
aaa bbb.pdf foo.pdf

• PenguinCoder: Beautiful! +1 !
• terdon: Don't you need to quote "{}" to deal with file names containing spaces?
• RedGrittyBrick: @terdon: Actually, no you don't (though that sort of problem does catch me out sometimes). See updated answer.

Answer 3

find -print0 /directory/with/pdfs -iname "*.pdf" | xargs -0 mv -t /papers

(similar to another answer but I prefer pipe/xargs/mv ... more intuitive for me)

FYI, I did the above one-line script successfully on multiple directories and multiple pdf files.

• Rich Homolka: xargs has the issue of "spaces in filenames" that -exec doesn't. You can mediate this somewhat by adding args -print0 to your find, and -0 to xargs.
• Trevor Boyd Smith: @RichHomolka see changed answer. (Thanks for the tip. That is really useful!)
• tollo: Have you ever tried that? Looks like you need to add the "-print0" at the end of the find command

Answer 4

For the Windows command line (cmd.exe), you can use:

for /F "usebackq delims==" %j IN (`dir /s /b *.pdf`) do copy "%j" c:\target_dir

• terdon: Hi and welcome to SU. Thank you for your answer, but the question specifically requests a linux solution.
• Vorac: It is still marvelous that windows can do that too!

Answer 5

If you're only searching one directory deep, you could do:

mkdir <destination>
mv */*.pdf <destination>

where <destination> stands for some directory. mv will not automatically create a directory for you.