I've got thousands of files with the format "^[[:digit:]]\{4\} - [[:alpha:]].*", for exampe: 7958 - a3ykof zyimeo3.txt. I'm trying to simply move them into folders alphabetically beginning with the first alpha-character after the hyphen.
I feel like I'm so close to getting this to happen the way I want but there's a (hopefully simple) problem.
I tested the commmand with echo first to make sure it grabs the correct information. Then I tried to execute it for real with mv. I've included some examples below based on this list of files:
1439 - a74389 josifj3oj.txt
3589 - Bfoei 839982 3il.txt
4719 - an38n8f n839mm20 mi02.txt
6398 - b39ji oij3o8 j2o.txt
9287 - A2984 j289jj9 oiw.txt
.... several thousand more files
This lists all the files starting with the letter "a" (after the 4 digits-space-hyphen-space pattern in the beginning):
for i in "$(ls | grep -i "^[[:digit:]]\{4\} - a")"; do echo "$i"; done
This doesn't put all the files starting with the letter "a" (after the 4 digits-space-hyphen-space pattern) in the "A" folder:
for i in "$(ls | grep -i "^[[:digit:]]\{4\} - a")"; do mv "$i" A; done
I expected this second command to move each file named "#### - a*" or "#### - A*" to the folder named A. But it sees it as one big string/filename joined by "\n".
Here's an example error message:
mv: cannot stat '1439 - a74389 josifj3oj.txt\n9287 - A2984 j289jj9 oiw.txt\n2719 - an38n8f n839mm20 mi02.txt': No such file or directory
Does anybody know what I'm missing?
Between @alvits's answer and @chepner's and @courtlandj comments, what worked flawless for me was this:
for directory in {A..Z}; do
mkdir -p "$directory" &&
find . -iregex "./[0-9]* - ${directory}.*" -exec mv -t "$directory" {} +;
done
Here's the simplest way to do it.
for directory in {A..Z}; do
mkdir "$directory" &&
find . -iregex "./[0-9]* - ${directory}.*" -exec mv "{}" "$directory" \;
done
The for loop will query for filenames according to each directory they belong.
The find command will find the files and move them to the directory.