Create sub-directories and organize files by date

Question

I have some directories of files copied from my security camera that I would like to organize into sub-directories by file date. So for example;

-rwxrwxrwx 0 root root 4935241 Jul 19  2012 DSCN1406.JPG
-rwxrwxrwx 0 root root 4232069 Jul 19  2012 DSCN1407.JPG
-rwxrwxrwx 0 root root 5015956 Jul 20  2012 DSCN1408.JPG
-rwxrwxrwx 0 root root 5254877 Jul 21  2012 DSCN1409.JPG

I would like a script that runs to see the files in that directory, then create the 3 needed directories named like;

drwxrwxrwx 1 root root     0 Sep  2 16:49 07-19-2012
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root     0 Sep  2 16:49 07-20-2012
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root     0 Sep  2 16:49 07-21-2012

And then move the files into the appropriate directories. Does anyone have any suggestions on a good scriptable way to accomplish this?

Solution 1

On Linux and Cygwin, you can use date -r to read out the modification date of a file.

for x in *.JPG; do
  d=$(date -r "$x" +%Y-%m-%d)
  mkdir -p "$d"
  mv -- "$x" "$d/"
done

(I use the unambiguous, standard and easily-sorted YYYY-MM-DD format for dates.)

Solution 2

This also checks if the object to be organized is a file or not. This is an important check, failing which a date's directory can itself get moved into another date. In effect this makes the answer more idempotent, allowing multiple runs.

dir="mention the directory path"
cd "$dir"

for x in *; do
    if [ -f "$x" ]; then
        d=$(date -r "$x" +%Y/%B/%d)
        mkdir -pv "$d"
        mv -v -- "$x" "$d/"
    fi
done

Comments

[Richard Ahlquist]

Perfect Gilles once I drop cased the .jpg it worked beautifully. Thank you!

[Alkeindem]

A shorter date format, same as %Y-%m-%d: date +%F

[Gilles 'SO- stop being evil']

@Acumenus No it won't. The date directories don't match *.JPG.