Shell – Delete all files starting with a question mark

These commands didn't work because wildcard patterns omit dot files (files whose name begins with the character .) unless the dot appears explicitly in the pattern. So *.un~ matches yourfile.txt.un~ but not .myfile.txt.un~, whereas .*.un~ does match .myfile.txt.un~.

You should be able to use find(1) for this (find wildcard matching doesn't treat dot files specially):

find / -name "*.un~" -not -path "~/.tmp/*" -delete

That tells find to search / for all files matching *.un~ that aren't in ~/.tmp and delete them. If you take off -delete it will just output a list, so you can check and make sure it's not going to delete the wrong things. You also might want to throw -mount in there to stop it from searching other filesystems you have mounted

If I understand correctly, you want to fire up one instance flac … | lame … for each input line, and interpolate the input into the arguments to both commands.

Since you need xargs to start a pipeline, you need to make it start a program that's capable of creating pipelines, i.e. a shell.

inotifywait -m -r -q -e moved_to --format "%w%f" ~/test |
xargs -l sh -c 'flac -cd "$0" - | lame -b 320 - "/media/1tb/$0.mp3"'

Alternatively, have the calling shell read lines one by one and run the pipeline.

inotifywait -m -r -q -e moved_to --format "%w%f" ~/test |
while IFS= read -r file; do
  flac -cd "$file" - | lame -b 320 - "/media/1tb/$file.mp3"
done

Note that the format %w%f produces an absolute path, to which you're prepending /media/1tb and appending .mp3. If you want to strip off the directory part of the file in the lame command, change $file to ${file##*/}. If you want to strip off the extension, change $file to ${file%.*}. If you want to do both, you'll have to do it in two steps. If you want to reproduce the directory hierarchy under /media/1tb, you can use mkdir -p.

cd ~/test
inotifywait -m -r -q -e moved_to --format "%w%f" . |
while IFS= read -r file; do
  [ -f "$file" ] || continue; # skip directories and other special files
  dir=${file%/*}; file=${file##*/}
  mkdir -p "/media/1tb/$dir"
  flac -cd "$dir/$file" - | lame -b 320 - "/media/1tb/$dir/${file#.*}.mp3"
done