CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macosterminalcatxargscp
Saro
Saro

Reputation: 23

Copy Files Contained in a Text File (MacOS)

I have a text file containing .M4B filenames (including source path). The file names contain spaces and quotes like:

/file/source/Ender's Game.m4b

/file/source/Ender's Shadow.m4b

/file/source/Speaker for the Dead.m4b

I'm trying to pipe the file contents to cp the audiobooks to the same destination using the xargs command:

cat /path/to/file/filenames.txt | xargs cp {} /destination/folder/ \ ; The first time i ran the command it returned xargs: unterminated quote

I then put quotes around the filenames /file/source/"Ender's Game.m4b" and ran the command and it returned: cp: /file/source/Ender's Game.m4b is not a directory

Using zsh and macOS Ventura 13.0.1

Upvotes: 0

Views: 176

Answers (1)

jjo
jjo

Reputation: 3020

A possible approach to overcome quotes' pain could be converting newlines to ascii nuls, then ab-using xargs -0:

cat /path/to/file/filenames.txt | tr '\n' '\000' | xargs -0 -I{} cp {} /destination/folder/

Upvotes: 1

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