Piping ls command output to cp or mv commands in Linux / Unix

Recently I had a task move or copy few files from one directory to another directory. In Linux, we can do this in multiple ways like using ls command xargs, find command, or while loop with ls or find…..etc.

Piping ls command output to cp or mv

I have used the first option i.e., ls command with xargs.

$ ls /source/directory | xargs -i cp {} /destionation/copy/directory

Example :

Need to move all JSON files to the destination folder

Before moving:

$ tree
.
├── destination
└── source
 ├── file1.json
 ├── file1.txt
 ├── file2.json
 ├── file2.txt
 ├── file3.json
 ├── file3.txt
 ├── file4.json
 └── file4.txt

After moving :

$ ls source/*.json | xargs -i mv {} destination/
$ tree
.
├── destination
│ ├── file1.json
│ ├── file2.json
│ ├── file3.json
│ └── file4.json
└── source
 ├── file1.txt
 ├── file2.txt
 ├── file3.txt
 └── file4.txt

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