A Unix find and move command (find in subdirectories)

This is a dangerous Unix command, but if you want to move a bunch of files from their subdirectories into your current directory, this find and mv command works:

find . -type f -exec mv {} . \;

That command finds all files beneath the current directory, and moves them into the current directory. I just moved a bunch of files from their (iTunes) subdirectories into my current working directory, and that find and move command did the trick. (But again, it’s a dangerous command, be careful out there.)

A "tar extract multiple" tip - How to extract multiple files from a tar archive

tar extract FAQ: Can you demonstrate how to extract (un-tar) multiple files from a tar archive, without extracting all files from the archive?

Sure, here are a couple of examples of how to extract multiple files from a tar archive (un-tar them), without extracting all the files in the archive.

First, if you just need to extract a couple of files from a tar archive, you can usually extract them like this, listing the filenames after the tar archive:

A Unix shell script to rename many files at one time

Summary: A Unix/Linux shell script that can be used to rename multiple files (many files) with one shell script command.


You're on a Mac OS X, Unix, or Linux system, and you'd like to be able to rename a large number of files at once. In particular, you'd like to be able to change the extensions of a large number of files, such as from *.JPG to *.jpg (changing the case of each file extension from upper case to lower case).

Linux ‘find’ example: How to copy one file to many directories

Did you ever need to take one file on a Linux or Unix system and copy it to a whole bunch of other directories? I had this problem recently when I changed some of the header files on this website. I had a file named header.html, and I needed to copy it to a bunch of subdirectories.

Using Unix, Linux, or Cygwin this turns out to be really easy. I used the Linux find command, in combination with the cp command. Once I figured out the right syntax, I was able to copy the file to nearly 500 directories in just a few seconds.