Command Line – Moving All .txt Files to a New Directory

command linedirectoryfilesmvrecursive

Basically, my hard drive is a mess and I have like 200+ sub-directories in a main directory. I want to essentially move all files in 200+ sub-directories that have the extension .txt etc to a new directory. For example, n00b.txt or n00b.txt.exe

So I try the following command in the main directory consisting of the 200+ subdirectories sudo mv **/*.txt ~/Desktop/tmpremo/

Instead I am getting this error: bash: /usr/bin/sudo: Argument list too long

Why am I getting it and how do I remove say .txt,.txt.exe? How do I fix it?

Best Answer

This would move all files with .txt and .txt.exe extensions present anywhere inside the current directory (even in subdirectories) to ~/Desktop/tmpremo.

$ sudo find . -type f \( -iname '*.txt' -o -iname '*.txt.exe' \) -exec mv {} ~/Desktop/tmpremo \;

If you want another extension too, just add -o -iname '*.extension' before the -exec.

PS: As @xenoid noted, please refrain from using sudo unless it is absolutely required for the task at hand.

Related Solutions

Move all files with a certain extension from multiple subdirectories into one directory

Go to the toplevel directory of the tree containing the zip files (cd …), then run

mv **/*.zip /path/to/single/target/directory/

This works out of the box in zsh. If your shell is bash, you'll need to run shopt -s globstar first (you can and should put this command in your ~/.bashrc). If your shell is ksh, you'll need to run set -o globstar first (put it in your ~/.kshrc).

Alternatively, use find, which works everywhere with no special preparation but is more complicated:

find . -name '*.zip' -exec mv {} /path/to/single/target/directory/ \;

If you want to remove empty directories afterwards, in zsh:

rmdir **/*(/^Fod)

In bash or ksh:

rmdir **/*/

and repeat as long as there are empty directories to remove. Alternatively, in any shell

find . -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} \;

Bash: moving files with spaces

Never, ever use for foo in $(cat bar). This is a classic mistake, commonly known as bash pitfall number 1. You should instead use:

while IFS= read -r file; do mv -- "$file" "new_place/$file"; done < file_list.txt

When you run the for loop, bash will apply wordsplitting to what it reads, meaning that a strange blue cloud will be read as a, strange, blue and cloud:

$ cat files 
a strange blue cloud.txt
$ for file in $(cat files); do echo "$file"; done
a
strange
blue
cloud.txt

Compare to:

$ while IFS= read -r file; do echo "$file"; done < files 
a strange blue cloud.txt

Or even, if you insist on the UUoC:

$ cat files | while IFS= read -r file; do echo "$file"; done
a strange blue cloud.txt

So, the while loop will read over its input and use the read to assign each line to a variable. The IFS= sets the input field separator to NULL^*, and the -r option of read stops it from interpreting backslash escapes (so that \t is treated as slash + t and not as a tab). The -- after the mv means "treat everything after the -- as an argument and not an option", which lets you deal with file names starting with - correctly.

^* _{This isn't necessary here, strictly speaking, the only benefit in this scenario is that keeps read from removing any leading or trailing whitespace, but it is a good habit to get into for when you need to deal with filenames containing newline characters, or in general, when you need to be able to deal with arbitrary file names.}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Move all files with a certain extension from multiple subdirectories into one directory

Bash: moving files with spaces

Related Question