'Housekeeping' script to create folder and move files - linux

Question

I have been trying to investigate how to automate a script (shell or other) that periodically (once an hour for example) moves files with a constant naming convention to a folder (which is automatically created if not already there).
The files are like this:
Camera1_01_20171213221830928.jpg
Camera1_01_20171213223142881.mp4
Basically it will be doing 'housekeeping'.
I'm new to shell scripts, and I just can't work out how to create a folder if it is not there (folder called 20171213 for example), then move the relevant files into it?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use if [ ! -d "$DIRNAME ]" to see if a directory called $DIRNAME exists. Further you can use mkdir to create directories.
Alternatively, you can just use mkdir and ignore any error that a directory already exists. Other than that, there are no negative side effects.

Answer 2

I won't be able to write the script for you because you don't have enough specific information in your post, but here are the tools I think you'll need:
Bash - Bash, for writing your script (Here's another useful reference)
Mkdir - For making a directory if its missing (look at the -p flag).
Cron - For scheduling the hourly execution of your script.
Sed - For creating the new file names from the old ones
The basic code will look something like this:
#!/bin/bash
FILES=/home/joshua/photos/sort-me
for photo in $FILES/*.jpg; do
if [[ -f photo ]]; then
new_photo_location= #<figure this part out based on your needs>
echo "I would move $photo to $new_photo_location"
#mv $photo $new_photo_location
fi
done
I recommend running it with that echo only until you see exactly what you like, then comment that line out and uncommont the mv line.
Finally, to run the script every hour on the hour, your cron entry will look something like this. (Type crontab -e to edit your crontab):
# Min Hour Day Month Day-of-Wk Year Must use absolute path
0 * * * * * /home/joshua/bin/sort-photos.sh

Answer 3

VDIR=$( date +%F )
VFILESFX=Camera*
[ ! -d $VDIR ] && mkdir $VDIR
while true ; do
LTMP=$( ls $VFILESFX )
for i in $LTMP ; do
fuser ${i}
[ $? -ne 0 ] && mv $i $VDIR/;
echo "File ${i} moved to ${VDIR}";
done
sleep 3600
done
Just some explanation about this script...
The first part set the current date into a variable VDIR and the prefix Camera* into VFILESFX.
The conditional command create a directory with the value existent in VDIR if this directory does not exist, after that go to a while command interacting every hour listing all the file with the prefix setted into VFILESFX and moving this files to the directory with the current date

Answer 4

I finally went with a perl script which I could more easily trigger from a cron job:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
use File::Copy;
main();
sub main
{
my $dir = "/srv/NAS1/Camera1";
opendir(my $fh, $dir) or die("Could not open '$dir' for reading: $!\n");
my #files = readdir($fh);
closedir($fh);
foreach my $file(#files)
{
if(-d $file)
{
next; # skip file if its a folder
}
if($file =~ /Camera1_01_(\d{8})\d{9}\.(jpg|mp4)/)
{
my $date = $1;
$date =~ /(\d{4})(\d{2})(\d{2})/;
my $folder = "$1-$2-$3";
# if the directory doesn't exist
if(!(-e -d "${dir}/${folder}"))
{
mkdir("${dir}/${folder}");
}
move("${dir}/$file","${dir}/${folder}");
}
}
}
Thanks for the contributions.