As a part of my workflow, I often face this scenario:
Now I want finder to separate the valid files from the heap of original files by either marking them or creating a new folder and copying them recursively.
How can I achieve this with automator?
Given a text file, filelist.txt, containing the files enumerated, one per line, the following command will move those files (and only those files) found in the current directory and beneath it, to a directory, destination, located in the user's Documents folder:
xargs -J % find . -name % -exec mv {} ~/Documents/destination/ \; < filelist.txt
xargs: accepts the files listed coming from stdin (or in this case, filelist.txt), replacing their path into the % variable in the following find command
find: locates those files if they exist, then executes the following command on each file
mv: moves the found file, represented by {}, to the destination
Incorporating this line into an Automator workflow is left to the reader.
