MacOS – Compress without .DS_Store and __MACOSX

As patrix mentioned in the comments, certain types of data (such as MP3, JPEG, MPEG) are not able to be compressed further because they are already compressed.

Compressing a bunch of MP3 files is not going to do much apart from bundling them together in one archive.

There are several ways to get this done in bash and friends (you could really knock yourself out using sed or awk). A rather simple way is to use cut to get the name of the folder

if [[ -d "$folder" ]]; then
    target=$(echo $(echo "$folder" | cut -d- -f 3))
    echo "Archiving $folder to Archived Projects → $target...";
    mv "$folder" /Volumes/communications/Projects/Archived\ Projects/$target/
fi

The $(echo $(echo ... )) is a lazy approach to get rid of the leading/trailing space (because cut doesn't support multi-char delimiters).

If you want to knock yourself out with sed you can use

    target=$(echo "$folder" | sed -n 's/^[^\-]*-[^\-]*- \([^\-]*\) -.*/\1/p')

instead of cut. This only works if the target folder name doesn't contain a - itself.

Instead of pattern matching you could also use a shell function to encapsulate most of the complexity.

#!/bin/bash

function checkAndMove() {
    if [[ "$1" == *$2* ]]; then
        echo "Archiving $1 to Archived Projects → $2...";
        mv "$1" /Volumes/communications/Projects/Archived\ Projects/$2/
    fi
}

cd /Volumes/communications/Projects/Completed\ Projects/

for folder in *; do
    if [[ -d "$folder" ]]; then
        checkAndMove Academics
        checkAndMove Admissions
        ...
    fi
done