在目录中的文件中找到字符串，然后将其复制

Question

i am running centos and have found similar questions, however no one needs to do exactly what i do.

I want to find a string inside any file reclusivly inside of:

/home/username/mail/.person1\\@someemaildir_com/

as it finds them or after it finds them, COPY any file that it found to another folder here:

/home/username/mail/.person2\\@someemaildir_com/.Mail\\ Folder/

Here is what i tried without it working:

grep -lir 'stringtofind' /home/username/mail/.person1\@someemaildir_com/* | xargs cp -t /home/username/mail/.person2\@someemaildir_com/.Mail\ Folder/

Answer 1

I'd propose following (assuming your grep "stringtofind" does what it should do):

grep -lir "stringtofind" /home/username/mail/.person1\@someemaildir_com/* | while read f; do
    cp "$f" /home/username/mail/.person2\@someemaildir_com/.Mail\ Folder/
done

" around $f may be important because of blanks in file- or folder-names

Answer 2

Ok for anyone else looking for this answer. i switched tactics and got the below working very well.

find /home/username/mail/.person1\@someemaildir_com/  -name '*' -exec grep -l "string to find" {} \; -exec cp {} /home/username/mail/.person2\@someemaildir_com/.Mail\ Folder/ \;