I am trying to use the -exec option with the find command to find specific files in my massive panoramas directory and move them to a specified location. The command I am using below passes an error argument not found for -exec. Can somebody point out my error in parsing the command? Or would I have to create a pipe of some sorts instead?
$ find -name ~/path_to_directory_of_photos/specific_photo_names* -exec mv {} ~/path_to_new_directory/
You need to terminate your exec'ed command with an escaped semicolon (\;).
You should quote the name pattern otherwise the shell will expand any wildcards in it, before running find. You also need to have a semicolon (backslashed to avoid the shell interpreting it as a command separator) to indicate the end of the mv command.
The correct command would be:
find ~/path_to_directory_of_photos -name "specific_photo_names*" -exec mv {} ~/path_to_new_directory \;
I know this post is old, but here's my answer in case it helps anyone else. See the background from this post. If you end the command with + instead of \; you can run it much more efficiently. \; will cause "mv" to be executed once per file, while + will cause "mv" to be executed with the maximum number of arguments. E.g.
mv source1 destination/
mv source2 destination/
mv source3 destination/
vs.
mv source1 source2 source3 destination/
The latter is much more efficient. To use +, you should also use --target-directory. E.g.
find ~/path_to_directory_of_photos -name "specific_photo_names*" -exec mv --target-directory="~/path_to_new_directory" {} +
