Looping through alphabets in Bash

Question

I want to mv all the files starting with 'x' to directory 'x'; something like:

mv path1/x*.ext path2/x

and do it for all alphabet letters a, ..., z

How can I write a bash script which makes 'x' loops through the alphabet?

Solution 1

for x in {a..z}
do
    echo "$x"
    mkdir -p path2/${x}
    mv path1/${x}*.ext path2/${x}
done

Solution 2

This should get you started:

for letter in {a..z} ; do
  echo $letter
done

Solution 3

here's how to generate the Spanish alphabet using nested brace expansion

for l in {{a..n},ñ,{o..z}}; do echo $l ; done | nl
1  a
 ...
14  n
15  ñ
16  o
...
27  z

Or simply

echo -e {{a..n},ñ,{o..z}}"\n" | nl

If you want to generate the obsolete 29 characters Spanish alphabet

echo -e {{a..c},ch,{d..l},ll,{m,n},ñ,{o..z}}"\n" | nl

Similar could be done for French alphabet or German alphabet.

Solution 4

Using rename:

mkdir -p path2/{a..z}
rename 's|path1/([a-z])(.*)|path2/$1/$1$2' path1/{a..z}*

If you want to strip-off the leading [a-z] character from filename, the updated perlexpr would be:

rename 's|path1/([a-z])(.*)|path2/$1/$2' path1/{a..z}*

Solution 5

With uppercase as well

for letter in {{a..z},{A..Z}}; do
  echo $letter
done

View more solutions

Comments

[Admin]

May I ask why you enclose x with braces on 4th and 5th line?

[Kamil Dziedzic]

It's not required here but well, it works, and makes parameters stand out better;) gnu.org/software/bash/manual/…

[Weijun Zhou]

Usually "$x" is enough and a better way to make it stand out.

[Enrico Carlesso]

Ugly alternative to avoid splitting the alphabet: for j in $(for i in $(echo {a..z} ñ ch ll ); do echo $i; done| sort | xargs); do echo "Hello-$j"; done

[4dc0]

@WeijunZhou that is a problem if you want to expand variable x followed by the letters 'y' and 'z'. if you try to expand "$xyz" the interpreter will think you're trying to print a variable named xyz while "${x}yz" will let the interpreter know exactly what you're trying to do

[Weijun Zhou]

I meant "$x"yz.

[Robert]

That is already covered in other answers. Please don't add duplicates, or explain how yours is better than the previous answers.