Why does find -exec mv {} ./target/ + not work?

The manual page (or the online GNU manual) pretty much explains everything.

find -exec command {} \;

For each result, command {} is executed. All occurences of {} are replaced by the filename. ; is prefixed with a slash to prevent the shell from interpreting it.

find -exec command {} +

Each result is appended to command and executed afterwards. Taking the command length limitations into account, I guess that this command may be executed more times, with the manual page supporting me:

the total number of invocations of the command will be much less than the number of matched files.

Note this quote from the manual page:

The command line is built in much the same way that xargs builds its command lines

That's why no characters are allowed between {} and + except for whitespace. + makes find detect that the arguments should be appended to the command just like xargs.

The solution

Luckily, the GNU implementation of mv can accept the target directory as an argument, with either -t or the longer parameter --target. It's usage will be:

mv -t target file1 file2 ...

Your find command becomes:

find . -type f -iname '*.cpp' -exec mv -t ./test/ {} \+

From the manual page:

-exec command ;

Execute command; true if 0 status is returned. All following arguments to find are taken to be arguments to the command until an argument consisting of `;' is encountered. The string `{}' is replaced by the current file name being processed everywhere it occurs in the arguments to the command, not just in arguments where it is alone, as in some versions of find. Both of these constructions might need to be escaped (with a `\') or quoted to protect them from expansion by the shell. See the EXAMPLES section for examples of the use of the -exec option. The specified command is run once for each matched file. The command is executed in the starting directory. There are unavoidable security problems surrounding use of the -exec action; you should use the -execdir option instead.

-exec command {} +

This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on the selected files, but the command line is built by appending each selected file name at the end; the total number of invocations of the command will be much less than the number of matched files. The command line is built in much the same way that xargs builds its command lines. Only one instance of `{}' is allowed within the command. The command is executed in the starting directory.

I encountered the same issue on Mac OSX, using a ZSH shell: in this case there is no -t option for mv, so I had to find another solution.However the following command succeeded:

find .* * -maxdepth 0 -not -path '.git' -not -path '.backup' -exec mv '{}' .backup \;

The secret was to quote the braces. No need for the braces to be at the end of the exec command.

I tested under Ubuntu 14.04 (with BASH and ZSH shells), it works the same.

However, when using the + sign, it seems indeed that it has to be at the end of the exec command.

The standard equivalent of find -iname ... -exec mv -t dest {} + for find implementations that don't support -iname or mv implementations that don't support -t is to use a shell to re-order the arguments:

find . -name '*.[cC][pP][pP]' -type f -exec sh -c '  exec mv "$@" /dest/dir/' sh {} +

By using -name '*.[cC][pP][pP]', we also avoid the reliance on the current locale to decide what's the uppercase version of c or p.

Note that +, contrary to ; is not special in any shell so doesn't need to be quoted (though quoting won't harm, except of course with shells like rc that don't support \ as a quoting operator).

The trailing / in /dest/dir/ is so that mv fails with an error instead of renaming foo.cpp to /dest/dir in the case where only one cpp file was found and /dest/dir didn't exist or wasn't a directory (or symlink to directory).