mjhjmtu

Im looking to copy the first 'n' files from one directory to another directory preferably with only cli tools (no scripts).

I've tried the following:

• 
  

  find . -maxdepth 1 -type f | head -5 | xargs cp -t /target/directory

  
  
  

  
  

  This looked promising, but failed because osx cp command doesn't appear to have the
  -t switch

  
  

  
  


• 
  

  exec in a few different configurations

  
  
  

  
  

  This probably failed for syntax problems on my end : /
  
  I couldn't seem to get a head type selection working

  
  

  
  

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

You need the -J option with xargs.

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f | head -n5 | xargs -J X cp X /target/directory

The J option places all the filenames into the placeholder X, which can be any character(s) and cp accepts multiple files to a target directory. It can be visualized as-

cp file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 DESTINATION

EDIT:

To handle filenames with spaces, we have find print the null character after each filename and then have xargs handle the null bit.

 find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0 | head -n5 | xargs -0 -J X cp X /target/directory

I found a different solution without xargs or -exec but I think fd0's answer is a better way to go:

while IFS= read -r f; do cp "$f" "/target/directory/"; done < <(find . -maxdepth 1 -type f | head -n5)