CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxunixmv
Andy
Andy

Reputation: 109

What happend with find -exec mv command

I just called 

find -name '*.wmv' -exec '{}' ../other ';'

where one of the matched files contained spaces like

./blabla - Copy/blabla.wmv

It returned the message 

find: `./blabla - Copy/blabla.wmv': No such file or directory

Now the source file is gone and in the target directory 'other' there's only a directory called 'blabla.wmv', but it's empty and I can't find the actual file.

I would have assumed that the command would expand to

mv './blabla - Copy/blabla.wmv' ../other

(with quotes around the source), but even if it expanded to 

mv ./blabla - Copy/blabla.wmv ../other

neither of the files 'blabla', '-' nor 'Copy/blabla.wmv' existed so that doesn't explain why the source file is gone and the directory 'blabla.wmv' was created. I'd like to know what really happened.

I don't really care about the file much but I want to be sure that it's not floating around somewhere it's not supposed to or overwrote something that's important.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 3361

Answers (1)

mata
mata

Reputation: 69082

There's no mv in your command.

Try:

find -name '*.wmv' -exec mv '{}' ../other ';'

Filenames with spaces are handled correctly by find.

Upvotes: 2

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