Using find to copy specific files on Linux

I was faced with a weird copy command I wanted to do today; so I thought I would share.

How do you copy files in a directory tree to another directory?

I wanted to copy all of the mp3 files in a directory tree over to one specific target directory.

Initially I thought the command

cp -r *.mp3 /target/directory/

would work, but  even though it specifies the –recursive option, it does not iterate the subdirectory looking for the mp3 files.

So I resorted to my  every faithful companion: find -exec.  It seems like this is one of the most useful tools in Linux.  In this case, here is the command line I used:

find . -type f -name ‘*.mp3’ -exec cp {} /targetdirectory/ \;