The find command is very useful for organizing your files and folders, or in combination with bash scripting. For example I had an mp3 player which would only play mp3s that were not inside a directory.  Now all my music is located inside sub-directories, so I could spend most of my day moving them out, or I could use the find command.

find . -iname \*.mp3 -type f -exec cp {} ./local/ \;

This line here will search every file and folder in the current directory, and if the file ends in “.mp3” then it will be copied to a folder called “local“,

A break down of the command is like this.
-iname – Base of the file name with all leading directories removed.
-type f – The file is of type “regular file“, for directories the flag is “d“.
-exec – This executes a command if 0 status is returned, if there is a file,
cp {} ./local/ \; – “cp” is the command to be run. “{}” is replaced by the current file name being processed, “\;” terminates the command.

Hope this helps,

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