How to -find -exec cp files from a list containing a portion of the filename - regex

Question

I've been searching for a long time and can't find an answer that works. I have a list with partial filenames (the first few letters of the filenames). If I place the file names individually as follows it works:
find ~/directory/to/search -name "filename*" -print -exec cp '{}' ~/directory/to/copyto \;
If I try to include the list in this scenario it does not:
cat ~/directory/List.txt | while read line
do
echo "Text read from file - $line"
find ~/directory/to/search -name "$line*" -type f
done
neither does this:
cat ~/directory/List.txt | while read line
do
echo "Text read from file - $line"
find ~/directory/to/search -name "$line&*" -type f
done
Ultimately, I'd like to add:
-exec cp '{}' ~/directory/to/copy/to \;
And copy over all files matching the find criteria.
I've tried using grep but the files are huge so it would take forever. I tried using all sorts of combinations of find, xargs, cp, grep and regex as read in previous searches and no luck.
Is the only solution to write a long script with a bunch of if then statements? I've been using Linux but it would be cool to use it on mac as well.

Answer 1

Here is a crude attempt at getting away with a single find invocation.
predicates=()
or=''
while read -r line; do
predicates+=($or -name "$line*")
or="-o"
done < ~/directory/list.txt
find ~/directory/to/search -type f \( "${predicates[#]}" \) \
-exec cp -t ~/directory/to/copy/to {} +
The array functionality requires an extended shell (Bash, ksh, etc) with this functionality; it won't work with /bin/sh.
cp -t is a GNU extension; if you don't have that, maybe just use your original -exec cp {} dir \; though it will be less efficient. Some old versions of find also don't support -exec ... +.