Comments on: Help With Command Line Basics

By: sheepeatingtaz

sheepeatingtaz — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 06:58:55 +0000

Pinched from Grifferz:

$ cd ~/fonts
$ find . -type f -iname '*.ttf' -print0 | xargs -I{} -0 cp {} ~/.fonts/

By: Omahn

Omahn — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 20:56:49 +0000

I’ll try and catch you tomorrow in #lugradio – that command should work.
(as in, it works for me)

By: sheepeatingtaz

sheepeatingtaz — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:52:19 +0000

Martin: I could, but I want to get rid of the subdirectories, so that all the font files are together in one directory, and I want to NOT copy other files that are in the subdirectories.

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:46:28 +0000

Hows about renaming the fonts dir?

By: sheepeatingtaz

sheepeatingtaz — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:40:57 +0000

Omahn: With that, nothing gets copied
Will: With that I get cp: missing destination file operand after `/home/sheepeatingtaz/.fonts'

But thanks for the help, it is appreciated.

By: Will Thompson

Will Thompson — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:17:44 +0000

That solution will run cp once per font. I suspect there’s a way to use xargs to use only a single invocation of cp.

The best way that I can see is:
(find ~/fonts -iname ‘*.ttf’; echo ~/.fonts) | xargs cp

The `echo` is to put the destination at the end of the argument list. Is there a better way to do this, anyone?

By: Omahn

Omahn — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:32:11 +0000

and when I say ‘fine’ I really mean ‘find’

By: Omahn

Omahn — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:31:40 +0000

If I understand what you’re asking, I think this will do:

cd ~/fonts
fine -iname ‘*.ttf’ -exec cp ‘{}’ ~/.fonts/ \;