How to copy files filtered with grep

Question

I need find and copy files in /usr/share/man

Especialy need man7-8 and everything that have "et" in name. I try this:

ls man7 man8 | grep "et"

This works perfectly.

Than i want that files copy with cp but i dont know how to format it properly

ls man7 man8 | grep "et" | xargs -I '{}' cp '{}' /home/marty/homework

But this is not working

Answer 1

It's not working because ls directory just outputs the filenames, without the directory prefixes. So cp doesn't know what directory to copy the file from.

But there's need for ls or grep , just use a wildcard.

cp man7/*et* man8/*et* /home/marty/homework

Your code would also fail for any filenames containing whitespace, since xargs treats that as a delimiter by default.