Copying Thousands of Files from a search result to one directory

Question

I have a lot of identically named "data.xml" files on my system in different directories.

A basic Windows search easily finds all of these. I would love to be able to do a search on these, find them, and copy them to a directory so there are named data_1.xml etc. etc.

Just the fact that they're all in one directory is what I'm aiming for.

I've tried using Teracopy to do the heavy lifting of copying but it's not renaming the files correctly. Is there any tool out there for something like this?

Answer 1

Just for completeness, here's a Windows-based solution to run in the CMD shell:

@echo off

set SRC=c:\source
set DST=c:\dest
set FN=0

for /F "usebackq delims=" %%i in (`dir /s /b %SRC%\*.xml`) do call :docopy "%%i"
goto end

:docopy
set /A FN=%FN% + 1
echo copy %1 "%DST%\%~n1_%FN%%~x1"
:end

Answer 2

@bobber205

find / -name "*.xml" -exec cp  {} ./ \;

Should do the job.

Store this script say rename.sh and then ./rename.sh

this would rename them

#!/bin/sh
i=1
for j in `ls *.xml`
do
  orig=$j
  echo $orig
  mv $orig orig$i.xml
   i=`expr $i + 1`
done

EDIT

another way to copy is

 find / -name "*.xml" | xargs cp {} /path/to/copy