Finding all .cpp and .h files and moving them to ~/junk

Question

I created a folder on my home directory call junk, and let's say I want to move all .cpp and .h files to it. How would I do it? My first thought is to start with find ~ -name *.cpp -print, but I don't know how to put in multiple patterns into the find argument, and I'm fairly lost after that.

Answer 1

portably:

cd &&
 find . -path ./junk -prune -o -type f \( \
 -name '*.h' -o -name '*.cpp' \) -exec sh -c '
 exec mv -i "$@" junk' sh {} +

Above excluding the junk folder itself from the search.

We're only removing regular files (-type f). There may be other types of files you want to move like symlinks, but beware that moving symlinks often break them.

The -i is a safeguard to avoid two files with the same name overriding each other.

• Rahul Patil: please once check my updated answer, I think I have wrongly explain regex part
• grebneke: Could you please explain the extra calls to sh? As opposed to for instance find . ! -path './junk/*' -type f \( -name '*.h' -o '*.cpp' \) -exec mv -i "{}" ./junk/ \;
• Stéphane Chazelas: @grebneke, mv -i {} junk \; would run one mv per file. Using + means pass as may files as possible. You need sh to be able to have a junk argument after that list. With GNU or FreeBSD mv, you could have done -exec mv -it junk {} + instead.
• grebneke: @StephaneChazelas - I see, but there are two sh, what does the second one do sh {} +?
• Stéphane Chazelas: @grebneke, the first argument after sh -c code is for 0ドル (used for error messages...), "$@" starts after.

Answer 2

If on a GNU system, you can use the -regex option to find as shown below:

find . -regex ".*\.\(h\|cpp\)" -exec echo mv -v "{}" ~/junk \;

the output will show which command would be executed, like a dry run. If that looks good, you can remove the echo for applying.

Command Break Down

• -regex : File name matches regular expression pattern, the default regex type it's uses emacs
• ".*\.\(h\|cpp\)" : Since it's uses default regex type emacs, as per pattern match . (dot) means matches any character so to match exact . ( dot), we have to use escape character that is \. means for special character like (, | we have to use escape character. the pattern same as .*.(h|cpp) (regextype posix-egrep )
• -exec : Execute command
• { } : The string { } replaced by the matches file name
• \; : Needs to be there as it tells the end of arguements provided to -exec variable

For more information on regular expression you can refer

• man 7 regex
• Regex Tutorial

• Jonathan Chiou: can you break down what ".*\.(h\|cpp)" means? I'm a beginner so I'm completely lost.
• Rahul Patil: @JonathanChiou See the updated answer..

Answer 3

According to pinfo bash->Shell Expansions->Filename Expansion->3.5.8.1 Pattern Matching, the ‘extglob’ shell option may be enabled using the ‘shopt’ builtin. Apparently, Cargo, Rust's package manager and build tool also enables this in their bash completion script with shopt -s extglob. So my shell already recognizes several extended pattern matching operators. Lists of patterns can separated by a ‘|’.

‘?(PATTERN-LIST)’ Matches zero or one occurrence of the given patterns.

‘*(PATTERN-LIST)’ Matches zero or more occurrences of the given patterns.

‘+(PATTERN-LIST)’ Matches one or more occurrences of the given patterns.

‘@(PATTERN-LIST)’ Matches one of the given patterns.

‘!(PATTERN-LIST)’ Matches anything except one of the given patterns.

So we can do something like this.

mkdir -p ~/junk
for name in *.?(h|cpp); do echo mv -- "${name}" ~/junk/; done
mv -- ggml-alloc.h ~/junk/
mv -- ggml-backend.h ~/junk/
mv -- ggml-backend-impl.h ~/junk/
mv -- ggml-cuda.h ~/junk/
mv -- ggml.h ~/junk/
mv -- ggml-impl.h ~/junk/
mv -- ggml-metal.h ~/junk/
mv -- ggml-mpi.h ~/junk/
mv -- ggml-opencl.cpp ~/junk/
mv -- ggml-opencl.h ~/junk/
mv -- ggml-quants.h ~/junk/
mv -- llama.cpp ~/junk/
mv -- llama.h ~/junk/
mv -- unicode.h ~/junk/

And then remove the echo, if it purports to do what we want...