Ubuntu – Move files in subdir to another dir

directoryfiles

I have a directory :
../Music with a lot of music files in a lot of subdirectories.

How would i move all the files in the subdirectories to another directory ?
Thus, i only want to move the files, i don't want to keep the subdirectory structure.

Best Answer

Assuming the current directory has the subfolders, replace TARGET_DIR in the following statement in use it:

find . -name '*.mp3' -exec mv {} TARGET_DIR \;

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Move only the last 8 files in a directory to another directory

You can use for, which loops over the files in an ordered way, and allows us to avoid parsing the output of find or ls, to avoid issues with spaces and other special characters in filenames. Many thanks to @muru for improving this :)

i=0; j=$(stat ~/Documents/* --printf "%i\n" | wc -l); for k in ~/Documents/*; do if (( (j - ++i) < 8 )); then echo mv -v "$k" ~/AnotherDirectory; fi; done

Test it first with echo, then remove echo to actually move the files.

As a script:

#!/bin/bash
i=0
j=$(stat ~/Documents/* --printf "%i\n" | wc -l )
for k in ~/Documents/*; do
  if (( (j - ++i) < 8 )); then
    echo mv -v -- "$k" ~/AnotherDirectory
  fi
done

again, remove echo after testing to move the files for real

Explanation

i=0 telling the shell to start iterating at 0
j=$(stat ~/Documents/* --printf "%i\n" | wc -l ) this is setting the variable j to an integer equal to the total number of files in the directory. Thanks to Serg's answer to my own question on how to count files reliably no matter what characters their names contain
do if (( (j - ++i) < 8 )) for each iteration of the loop, test whether the outcome of j minus the number of times the loop has been run is less than 8 and if it is then
mv -v -- "$k" ~/AnotherDirectory move the file to the new directory

Ubuntu – How to move some files to their parent directory

Try:

find . -path "*/flac/*" -name '*.mp3' -execdir mv -t ../ {} +

How it works

find .

Start a find command working on the current directory.
-path "*/flac/*"

Select only files with flac in their path
-name '*.mp3'

Select only files with extension .mp3.
-execdir mv -t ../ {} +

For any files found run the mv command from the directory that the file is in and move the file to the parent directory.

In addition to making this particular task easy, the option -execdir is also more secure than than the traditional -exec option.

Simplification

find . -path "*/flac/*.mp3" -execdir mv -t ../ {} +