On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 09:25:57AM -0700, Bill Jonas wrote: > On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 10:53:20PM -0700, Michael Wittman wrote: > > Then run the command: > > find /mydir/myfiles -name \*.pdf -print0 | xargs -0 -n 2500 -s 10000 cp-files > ... > > Normally you don't need to create a separate script to use with xargs, but > > cp (and mv) have the peculiar property that the last argument is special. > > No need to in this case, either: > > find /mydir/myfiles -name \*.pdf -print0 | xargs -0 -i cp "{}" /newdir That's true, but it forces xargs to invoke "cp" once for each file, rather than once for every several thousand. That will take a lot longer if you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of files. -Mike