how can I move files with specific names from one folder to another

Question

I have read this Copying multiple specific files from one folder to another which could not help me.

I have thousands of files in /Users/Marine/Desktop/folderGN, some of which I want to keep and some of which I want to move.

There are several files with different names and I want to move only those that have a name containing Protein or MSMS or PSms.

I want to move them from

/Users/Marine/Desktop/folderGN

to

/Users/Marine/Descktop/myfolder 

Solution 1

To glob for the different names, you can use a for loop like so

for f in /Users/Marine/Descktop/folderGN/{*[Pp]rotein*,*MSMS*,*PSms*}; do echo mv -v -- "$f" /Users/Marine/Descktop/myfolder ; done

Remove the echo after testing to actually move the files.

I have copied your paths exactly (including the possible typo in Descktop?), but you could instead do this with relative paths:

cd /Users/Marine/Descktop/folderGN
for f in *[Pp]rotein* *MSMS* *PSms* ; do echo mv -v -- "$f" ../myfolder ; done 

(remove echo after testing as before)

Solution 2

This is in fact very simple. If you want files with a certain letters/numbers in their name, and anywhere in the name, to be moved to some directory, just:

move *some_name* directory

Comments

[Learner Algorithm]

thank you so much. I cannot like it too but it solved my problem. I have one more question which I will ask soon

[Zanna]

@LearnerAlgorithm you're welcome :D

[Learner Algorithm]

I asked another question, I would appreciate if you could help me there too askubuntu.com/questions/857999/…