Move multiple files to multiple to multiple directories

Question

I have 5 files called file1.txt, file2.txt ... file5.txt and I would like to move each one into a respective directory called dir1, dir2 ... dir5.

So file1.txt is moved into dir1, file2.txt is moved into dir2 and so on.

Is there a way to do this in one line at the command line, using mv and xargs perhaps?

I'm only suggesting xargs because I quite like this answer provided by Robert Gamble to a question asking how to copy one file to multiple directories.

echo dir1 dir2 dir3 | xargs -n 1 cp file1

Answer 1

I would personally prefer a solution that relies on a for loop, e.g.:

for n in {1..5}; do echo mv -- "file$n.txt" "dir$n/"; done
#                   ^^^^ remove that

This can be done with xargs but I find the solution to be less elegant:

seq 1 5 | xargs -n1 -I{} echo mv -- "file{}.txt" "dir{}/"
#                        ^^^^ remove that