Moving files to a directory

I wanted to move all the files having certain patterns of the current directory to a folder.

Example- I wanted to move all the files starting with nz to foobar directory. I tried it using mv but didn't work out well.

From stackoverflow

• This will do it, though if you have any directories beginning with nz it will move those too.

  for files in nz*
  do
  mv $files foobar
  done
  

  Edit: As shown above this totally over the top. However, for more complex pattern matches you might do something like:

  for files in `ls | grep [regexp]`
  do
  mv $files foobar
  done
  

• mv nz* foobar should do it.

• Try to use "mmv", which is installed on most Linux distros.

• mv nz* foobar/

• find . | grep "your_pattern" | xargs mv destination_directory
  

  Does the following:

  • Finds all files in the current directory
  • Filters them according to your pattern
  • Moves all resulting files to the destination directory
  lhunath : Don't grep filenames. Especially not with find(1): it has -name. Also don't use xargs without -0. Especially not with find(1): it has -exec.

  Benedikt Eger : Except for the fact that find can search for names what could go wrong with grepping filenames?