Question

I would like to pass the output list of elements of a command as a parameter of another command. I have found some other pages:

• How to display the output of a Linux command on stdout and also pipe it to another command?
• Use output of bash command (with pipe) as a parameter for another command

but they seem to be more complex.

I just would like to copy a file to every result of a call to the Linux find command.

What is wrong here?:

find . -name myFile 2>&1 | cp /home/myuser/myFile $1

Thanks

Answer 1

This is what you want:

find . -name myFile -exec cp /home/myuser/myFile {} ';'

A breakdown / explanation of this:

• find: invoking the find command
• .: start search from current working directory.
• Since no depth flags are specified, this will search recursively for all subfolders
• -name myFile: find files with the explicit name myFile
• -exec: for the search results, perform additional commands with them
• cp /home/myuser/myFile {}: copies /home/myuser/myFile to overwrite each result returned by find to ; think of {} as where each search result goes.
• ';': used to separate different commands to be run after find