Ubuntu – Moving files of specific type/extension from one directory to another

bashmkdir

Have a large folder filled with a large collection of different files.Ideally, I want to shift all the different files into their respective folders; so jpg files into the jpg folder etc.

Original folder : unsorted_files
destination folder: jpgfolder
I tried

mv /home/tony/Desktop/unsorted_files/*.jpg /home/tony/Desktop/jpgfolder

But got an error "jpgfolder" is not a directory"

Best Answer

Taking in account that 1) Q said "large collection ... of files" - the list of files might not all fit in one command line buffer (2,084,684 bytes on MY system); and 2) Filenames might contain funny characters ("My Stuff.jpg"); mv is not the best way. Using find, xargs, and the sure knowledge that filenames must NOT contain NUL bytes (or slashes):

find /home/tony/Desktop/unsorted_files/ -maxdepth 1 -type f -iname '*.jpg' -print0 | \
    xargs -0 --no-run-if-empty echo mv --target-directory=/home/tony/Desktop/jpgfolder

Once the echod commands look right, remove the echo, and let mv do the work.

If you have already done mv /home/tony/Desktop/unsorted_files/*.jpg /home/tony/Desktop/jpgfolder BEFORE you created the /home/tony/Desktop/jpgfolder, nothing has been lost, but you must, as other answers have said, mkdir -p /home/tony/Desktop/jpgfolder first.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – A script for moving files from subdirs to parent dir

You can use:

find test/*/* -type d | xargs -n1  sh -c 'echo mv -b ${0}/* "$( dirname ${0})" ";" rm -rvf ${0} '

It will just print Output on screen as below :

mv -b test/1/B/file1 test/1/B/file2 test/1/B/file3 test/1 ; rm -rvf test/1/B
mv -b test/1/C/file1 test/1/C/file2 test/1/C/file3 test/1 ; rm -rvf test/1/C
mv -b test/2/B/file1 test/2/B/file2 test/2/B/file3 test/2 ; rm -rvf test/2/B
mv -b test/2/C/file1 test/2/C/file2 test/2/C/file3 test/2 ; rm -rvf test/2/C
mv -b test/3/B/file1 test/3/B/file2 test/3/B/file3 test/3 ; rm -rvf test/3/B
mv -b test/3/C/file1 test/3/C/file2 test/3/C/file3 test/3 ; rm -rvf test/3/C
mv -b test/4/B/file1 test/4/B/file2 test/4/B/file3 test/4 ; rm -rvf test/4/B
mv -b test/4/C/file1 test/4/C/file2 test/4/C/file3 test/4 ; rm -rvf test/4/C
mv -b test/5/B/file1 test/5/B/file2 test/5/B/file3 test/5 ; rm -rvf test/5/B
mv -b test/5/C/file1 test/5/C/file2 test/5/C/file3 test/5 ; rm -rvf test/5/C

If output looks OK then you can simply append | sh at the end of that command, then it will run command which is shows in output.

Ubuntu – How to move all java source files to their respective package directory

#Loop through the java files
for f in *.java; do

    # Get the package name (com.pkgX)
    package=$(grep -m 1 -Po "(?<=^package )[^; ]*" "$f")

    # Replace . with / and add src/ at the beginning
    target_folder="src/${package//./\/}"

    # Create the target folder
    mkdir -p "$target_folder"

    # move the file to the target folder
    mv "$f" "$target_folder"

done

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – A script for moving files from subdirs to parent dir

Ubuntu – How to move all java source files to their respective package directory

Related Question