Bash Script to Copy Folders by first character - linux

Question

I'm a newbie to ubuntu/Linux, and just got my first bash script to execute.
I'm trying to copy and organize my music collection from driveA to driveB.
driveA has all my artists folders (e.g Adele, Brian, Bob Marley, Cassie) the path to this /media/myMusic
in driveB i have created folders A, B, C and the path to those is /media/orderedMusic
All artist folders whose first character is A or B or C in driveA will be copied to respective folders in driveB i.e. Adele would be copied to /media/orderedMusic/A,
Brian and Bob Marley would be copied to /media/orderedMusic/B and so on.
here is what i have so far, help would be highly appreciated. Thanks
#!/bin/bash
folder1=/media/myMusic
folder2=/media/orderedMusic
for dir in $folder1
do
if []
then
cp
fi
done

Answer 1

This should do the trick:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
folder1=/media/myMusic
folder2=/media/orderedMusic
cd "$folder1" && {
for artist in *; do
dest=$folder2/${artist:0:1}
mkdir -p "$dest"
cp -rp "$artist" "$dest"
done
}
Note that if you are on a case-sensitive filesystem and have artist names that aren't capitalized, you will get separate folders in the destination tree for the two cases.. e.g. an "A" folder and an "a" folder.

Answer 2

You could use substring extraction: ${string:start_index:length}:
#!/bin/bash
folder1=/media/myMusic
folder2=/media/orderedMusic
for dir in "$folder1/*"
do
initial=${dir:0:1}
src="$folder1/$dir"
dest="$folder2/$initial"
# test if the destination directory exists
if [ ! -d "$dest" ]
then
mkdir $dest
fi
cp -r $src $dest
done
Also you could use string index as you need only the first one character in a string.
For more details, see http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/string-manipulation.html