Need to loop through folder and move files to different directory?

Question

I have a bunch of files in sub-directories that I want to move to a different directory.

The directories are organized in one parent directory like this: Apr1995 Apr1996 Aug1995 etc... (month then year)

so /Files/Apr1995 for example.

the files are formatted like this 1995___.info or 1995___.dat

I want to go into each sub directory and move files to a different directory where the sub directories are separated by year and then format. Something like this:

OtherFiles/1995/info, OtherFiles/1995/dat, OtherFiles/1996/info, etc.

The 1995 directory would have sub-directories named info and dat

In the end I want this organization for example:

Desktop/Files/Apr1995/1995__.info,

Desktop/Files/Apr1995/1995__.dat,

Desktop/OtherFiles/1995/info,

Desktop/OtherFiles/1995/dat and so on

I've tried quite a few options like a couple of one liners:

 for d in ./*/ ; do (cd "$d" && mv 1995*.info /1995/info); done

or

 find ./ -type f -execdir mv 1995*.info /1995/info {} \;

I just get mv errors or it doesn't recognize that their are files like those.

A shell script could help too.

I'm kind of at a loss for something that seems relatively easy. Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT: hopefully the added info can help

Solution

Your second command will work but you didn't specify the file name. If you want to move all of the files matching the pattern of 1995_.info and/or 1995_.dat

find ./ -type f -name 1995*.info -exec mv {} /1995/info \;

find ./ -type f -name 1995*.dat -exec mv {} /1995/dat \;

If you want to do all years in one command:

for y in {1995..1999}; do $(find Years -type f -name $y*.info -exec mv {} '/'$y'/info' \;); done

for y in {1995..1999}; do $(find Years -type f -name $y*.dat -exec mv {} '/'$y'/dat' \;); done

That will loop through the directories with each year and find the filenames and move them to their yearly directories.

Sidenote: I tested and confirmed this in CentOS 7.4 but depending on the environment, you may need to escape the * so you can add a backslash in front of it: \*

Comments

[Kusalananda]

It is unclear where you would want to move the files and what your file hierarchy looks like both before and after the operation. Could you maybe add an example?

[Sparhawk]

I don't really understand the hierarchy either, but a few comments: you cd in the loop, but never cd back to the parent. Is /1995/info really the right path?

[Sparhawk]

@Kusalananda Ah yes, I didn't pick up on that. Cheers.

[Kusalananda]

Also: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/131766/… and unix.stackexchange.com/questions/171346/…

[ctrl-alt-delor]

Warning: If you have matching files in the current working directory, then the glob (*) will be expanded. Sidenote: when you don't have matching files, then it depends on shell settings, not distro (some distros may have different default settings).

[Nasir Riley]

@cltr-alt-delor This is true. It does indeed depend on the environment. I've updated the answer to reflect this.