Using regular expressions with cp

The UNIX shell uses glob patterns, not regular expressions. So, if you want to match file names starting with axis2 and ending with .jar, you use:

cp axis2*.jar /destination/directory

If you have GNU find and GNU cp available, you can use regular expressions as in the following command:

find . -maxdepth 1 -regextype posix-basic -regex '.*/axis2[^/]*jar$' \
       -exec cp -t ~/MyDirectory {} +

This can be handy if neither glob pattern nor bash extended glob pattern suite your needs.