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bashmacosunixmv

unix command for file seperation in two different folders

I am currently in data folder which has following files and folders

Folders:
    ISOLATE
    JUKEBOX

Files:
XXX-12-2345-67A-89T-1011-12.ab20.RenderBase20.ISOLATE.quantifier.txt
XXX-12-2345-67A-89T-1011-12.ab20.RenderBase20.JUKEBOX.quantifier.txt
XXX-24-2345-67A-89T-2022-24.ab10.RenderBase20.ISOLATE.quantifier.txt
XXX-24-2345-67A-89T-2022-24.ab10.RenderBase20.JUKEBOX.quantifier.txt
...

I want to put the files with .ISOLATE in Folder ISOLATE and .JUKEBOX ones in the JUKEBOX folder. How could I perform this task using terminal?

There are more than 12000 files, so I cannot really change the naming scheme.

Thanks in advance

Solution

  • In addition to trying wildcards (bash pattern match or globs), which at some point will hit an upper limit based on the number of files, you can also use find and xargs:

    find . -name '*.ISOLATE.*.txt' -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 -IFILE mv FILE ./ISOLATE
find . -name '*.JUKEBOX.*.txt' -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 -IFILE mv FILE ./JUKEBOX

    Doing this won't be subject to the maximum number of command line arguments that the glob solution may hit.

    They key things in the commands above are:

    • -maxdepth 1 ensures that find won't keep looking into the ./ISOLOATE or ./JUKEBOX subdirectories
    • -print0 causes find to delimit the file names with a null byte rather than whitespace. This protects you against files that have spaces or other special characters in their names.
    • -0 causes xargs to use the null byte delimiter rather than whitespace for the same reason
    • -IFILE tells xargs to use the string FILE for each of the arguments. Typically xargs puts the filenames on the right, which wouldn't work with the mv command.

    I tested the approach with a small shell script:

    touch XXX-12-2345-67A-89T-1011-12.ab20.RenderBase20.ISOLATE.quantifier.txt
touch XXX-12-2345-67A-89T-1011-12.ab20.RenderBase20.JUKEBOX.quantifier.txt
touch XXX-24-2345-67A-89T-2022-24.ab10.RenderBase20.ISOLATE.quantifier.txt
touch XXX-24-2345-67A-89T-2022-24.ab10.RenderBase20.JUKEBOX.quantifier.txt

mkdir ISOLATE
mkdir JUKEBOX

find . -name '*.ISOLATE.*.txt' -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 -IFILE mv FILE ./ISOLATE
find . -name '*.JUKEBOX.*.txt' -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 -IFILE mv FILE ./JUKEBOX
find .

    Which outputs:

    $ bash example.sh 
.
./example.sh
./ISOLATE
./ISOLATE/XXX-12-2345-67A-89T-1011-12.ab20.RenderBase20.ISOLATE.quantifier.txt
./ISOLATE/XXX-24-2345-67A-89T-2022-24.ab10.RenderBase20.ISOLATE.quantifier.txt
./JUKEBOX
./JUKEBOX/XXX-12-2345-67A-89T-1011-12.ab20.RenderBase20.JUKEBOX.quantifier.txt
./JUKEBOX/XXX-24-2345-67A-89T-2022-24.ab10.RenderBase20.JUKEBOX.quantifier.txt