MacOS – Move files to individual folders, using file name as folder naming convention for folder, using Terminal

If you're comfortable opening the terminal you could run the command

locate ABC/readme.txt

and it will give you the full file path to any files on your machine that are named readme.txt in a folder named ABC.

While you're there you can copy and past the path as an argument to the open command and it will open it for you.

Taking it one step further you can use the output of locate as the arguments for open with xargs

locate ABC/readme.txt | xargs open

Will open all files that have ABC/readme.txt on your machine just as if you had double-clicked them.

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