CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxshell
bioinformatician
bioinformatician

Reputation: 364

Shell script - move files into folder

Suppose a particular command generates few files (I dont know the name of these files). I want to move those files into a new folder. How to do it in shell script?

i can't use :

#!/bin/bash
mkdir newfolder
command 
mv * newfolder

as the cwd contains lot of other files as well.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 11939

Answers (4)

Peter.O
Peter.O

Reputation: 6866

Assuming that your command prints out names with one per line, this script will work. 

my_command | xargs -I {} mv -t "$dest_dir" {}

Upvotes: 1

carlspring
carlspring

Reputation: 32697

If you'd like to move them into a sub-folder:

mv `find . -type f -maxdepth 1` newfolder

Setting a -maxdepth 1 will only find the files in the current directory and will not recurse. Passing in -type f means "find all files" ("d" would, respectively, mean "find all directories").

Upvotes: 1

David Webb
David Webb

Reputation: 193814

The first question is can you just run command with newfolder as the current directory to generate the files in the right place it begin with:

mkdir newfolder
cd newfolder
command

Or if command is not in the path:

mkdir newfolder
cd newfolder
../command

If you can't do this then you'll need to capture lists of before and after files and compare. An inelegant way of doing this would be as follows:

# Make sure before.txt is in the before list so it isn't in the list of new files
touch before.txt

# Capture the files before the command
ls -1 > before.txt

# Run the command
command

# Capture the list of files after
ls -1 > after.txt

# Use diff to compare the lists, only printing new entries
NEWFILES=`diff --old-line-format="" --unchanged-line-format="" --new-line-format="%l " before.txt after.txt`

# Remove our temporary files
rm before.txt after.txt

# Move the files to the new folder
mkdir newfolder
mv $NEWFILES newfolder

Upvotes: 4

matcheek
matcheek

Reputation: 5157

use pattern matching:

  $ ls *.jpg         # List all JPEG files
  $ ls ?.jpg         # List JPEG files with 1 char names (eg a.jpg, 1.jpg)
  $ rm [A-Z]*.jpg    # Remove JPEG files that start with a capital letter

Example shamelessly taken from here where you can find some more useful information about it.

Upvotes: 1

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