Move files to the correct folder in Bash

I have a few files with the format ReportsBackup-20140309-04-00 and I would like to send the files with same pattern to the files as the example to the 201403 file.

I can already create the files based on the filename; I would just like to move the files based on the name to their correct folder.

I use this to create the directories

old="directory where are the files" &&
year_month=`ls ${old} | cut -c 15-20`&&
for i in ${year_month}; do 
    if [ ! -d ${old}/$i ]
    then
        mkdir ${old}/$i
    fi
done

Solution

Here’s how I’d do it. It’s a little verbose, but hopefully it’s clear what the program is doing:

#!/bin/bash
SRCDIR=~/tmp
DSTDIR=~/backups

for bkfile in $SRCDIR/ReportsBackup*; do

  # Get just the filename, and read the year/month variable
  filename=$(basename $bkfile)
  yearmonth=${filename:14:6}

  # Create the folder for storing this year/month combination. The '-p' flag 
  # means that:
  #  1) We create $DSTDIR if it doesn't already exist (this flag actually
  #     creates all intermediate directories).
  #  2) If the folder already exists, continue silently.
  mkdir -p $DSTDIR/$yearmonth

  # Then we move the report backup to the directory. The '.' at the end of the
  # mv command means that we keep the original filename
  mv $bkfile $DSTDIR/$yearmonth/.

done

A few changes I’ve made to your original script:

I’m not trying to parse the output of ls. This is generally not a good idea. Parsing ls will make it difficult to get the individual files, which you need for copying them to their new directory.
I’ve simplified your if ... mkdir line: the -p flag is useful for “create this folder if it doesn’t exist, or carry on”.
I’ve slightly changed the slicing command which gets the year/month string from the filename.