CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bash
s01itarius 1upus
s01itarius 1upus

Reputation: 9

How to move files which are named as a variable in a for loop in bash?

I am trying to make a bash script that would ask me the number of files I want to move in a certain target directory and then it would ask me one by one the directory's of the files I want to move. Here is the code:

#!/bin/bash

echo "how many files do you want to move? "

#asking user the number of files they want to move and putting that number in a variable called FILENUM which would later be used in the for statement 
 
read FILENUM

echo "what is the target directory? "

#asking user the directory in which he want the files to be moved to... and putting it in a variable called TARDIR and the making a dir using the variable TARDIR

read -e TARDIR

mkdir "$TARDIR"

#making a for loop that will stop when a is equal to variable FILENUM
for a in $( seq 1 $FILENUM )  
do
    echo "what is the directory of file.$a : "

    read -e FILEDIR$a            #asking user the directory of the file he want to move.This process will make a unique variable (for every iteration in the for loop) in which the directory is stored
    
    mv "$FILEDIR$a" "$TARDIR"   #this is where the code breaks. 
done

read

Upvotes: 1

Views: 258

Answers (1)

peppapig450
peppapig450

Reputation: 72

Your code is not working because you have $a appended after $FILEDIR which is changing the name of the file you want to move. If you remove the $a after $FILEDIR everything will work just fine. You may also want to add a test for if the TARDIR exists like this.

if [[ ! -d $TARDIR ]]; then 
 mkdir $TARDIR
fi

So revised your script would probably look something like this

#!/bin/bash

echo "how many files do you want to move? "

#asking user the number of files they want to move and putting that number in a variable called FILENUM which would late
r be used in the for statement

read FILENUM

echo "what is the target directory? "

#asking user the directory in which he want the files to be moved to... and putting it in a variable called TARDIR and t
he making a dir using the variable TARDIR

read -e TARDIR

if [[ ! -d $TARDIR ]]; then
  mkdir "$TARDIR"
fi

#making a for loop that will stop when a is equal to variable FILENUM
for a in $( seq 1 $FILENUM )
do
    echo "what is the directory of file $a: "

    read -e FILEDIR         #asking user the directory of the file he want to move.This process will make a unique varia
ble (for every iteration in the for loop) in which the directory is stored

    mv "$FILEDIR" "$TARDIR"   #this is where the code breaks.
done

read

Upvotes: 1

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