cp/mv/etc : argument list too long ... I am sick of this

[Lothar Braun]

user wrote:
> Ok, so I have some big directories with lots of files.  If I do mv or cp,
> it always refuses, telling me:
> 
> cp: argument list too long
> 
> so, no problem ... I get creative with things like this:
> 
> for f in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W
> X Y Z ; do cp $f* /some/dir ; done


You could use find for that task:

find /directory/with/lots/of/files/ -exec cp {} /destination/directory/ \;