I want to move file1 to directory1 in many subdirectories of current directory. Both file1 and directory1 are in each subdirectory. I write the following script in current directory but it reports "./mv.sh: line 4: cd: directory1: No such file or directory". Actually, the directory1 is in each subdirectory.
1 #!/bin/bash
2
3 for i in *; do
4 builtin cd $i
5 mv file1 directory1
6 builtin cd ..
7 done
error
./mv.sh: line 4: cd: directory1: No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `file1': No such file or directory
Is it possible that directory1 is a dangling symbolic link? For example:
mkdir foo
ln -s foo foolink
mv foo bar # foolink still points to foo but foo is gone!
cd foolink
# bash: cd: foolink: No such file or directory
Also, instead of
cd dir
mv foo subdir
cd ..
I would recommend the more succinct, and more importantly, safer version:
mv dir/foo dir/subdir/
Why is this safer? Imagine that dir doesn't exist:
cd dir # Fails
mv foo subdir # Oops! Now we're trying to move a file from the current directory
cd .. # Even bigger oops! Now we're even higher in the directory tree,
# and on the next iteration will be moving files around that we
# shouldn't be
(You could also avert this issue in this particular case by using set -o errexit but in general cd .. in scripts is dangerous, in my opinion.)
Also, as Ansgar Wiechers said, you should use find instead of trying to crawl the tree yourself.
I'd use find rather than trying to crawl the directory tree:
find . -type f -name "file1" -execdir mv {} directory1/ \;
This assumes that each directory with a file file1 has a subdirectory directory1.
I suppose the cd .. in line 6 lead you to another directory. You can check this by inserting builtin pwd between lines 6 and 7. This shows you in which directory you actually are after the cd ...
Maybe one of the directories is in fact a link to another directory? This could be the reason for landing somewhere you did not expect.
If the cd $i fails, you could also land in a wrong directory, this may happen if $i is not a directory or you don't have permission to explore it.
Related
When I do ls | grep -e *-folder1 it prints my-folder1 that's the name of the folder matched in the command in current directory.
Is there a way I can add something like cd into this directory. This is more of an attempt to learn Bash or commands on Linux, rather than about doing what I am trying to accomplish.
You could do
ls | grep -- -folder1 | while read -r dir
do
cd "$dir"
# do things in $dir
done
# do things in the original directory
but parsing the output of ls is not recommended. You could instead use globbing:
for dir in *-efolder*
do
cd "$dir"
# do things in $dir
cd .. # need to back out again
done
# do things in the original directory
If the purpose isn't to grep on all folders matching a certain pattern and to cd down into each one of them, but to simply cd into a directory ending with -folder1, then:
cd *-folder1
If you get zero or multiple hits, cd will shown an error.
I am working on an open-source project. In most, but not all, of the sub-directories of depth 1, a file called "test.c" can be found. How can I find out those directories that do not include "test.c"?
For example, I have subdirectories dir1, dir2, dir3. Dir2 and dir3 have "test.c". I have to manually check them with "ls" to determine "dir1" does not have "test.c". Probably there is a simpler way (such as a bash command) to do so? I am under Ubuntu 16. So a bash command would be preferred.
You may use this find command from base directory of all the sub-directories:
find . -type d -exec bash -c 'for d; do [[ -f "$d"/test.c ]] || echo "$d"; done' - {} +
This command finds all sub directories from current directory and checks for presence of file test.c in each directory in the bash command. If file is not present then directory name is printed.
The path structure of the files on my server is similar to shown below,
/home/sun/sdir1/mp4/file.mp4
/home/sun/collection/sdir2/mp4/file.mp4
I would like to move the files of "mp4" into one level up(into sdir1 and sdir2 respectively)
So the output should be,
/home/sun/sdir1/file.mp4
/home/sun/collection/sdir2/file.mp4
I have no idea to do this, so not tried yet anything...
There are different ways to solve your problem
If you just want to move those specific files, run these commands:
cd /home/sun/
mv sdir1/mp4/file.mp4 sdir1/
mv sdir2/mp4/file.mp4 sdir2/
If you want to move all mp4 files on those directories (sdir1 and sdir2), run these commands:
cd /home/sun/
mv sdir1/mp4/*.mp4 sdir1/
mv sdir2/mp4/*.mp4 sdir2/
Edit:
Make a script that iterates all the directories:
Create a script and name it and edit it with your favorite editor (nano, vim, gedit, ...):
gedit folderIterator.sh
The script file content is:
#/bin/bash
# Go to the desired directory
cd /home/sun/
# Do an action over all the subdirectories in the folder
for dir in /home/sun/*/
do
dir=${dir%*/}
mv "$dir"/mp4/*.mp4 "$dir"/
# If you want to remove the subdirectory after moving the files, uncomment the following line
# rm -rf "$dir"
done
Save the file and give it execute permissions:
chmod +x folderIterator.sh
And execute it:
./folderIterator.sh
You can do this:
# move all .mp4 files from sdir1/mp4 to sdir1 directory
user#host:~/home/sun$ mv sdir1/mp4/*.mp4 sdir/
# move all .mp4 files from collection/sdir2/mp4 to collection/sdir2 directory
user#host:~/home/sun$ mv collection/sdir2/mp4/*.mp4 collection/sdir2/
# move only 1 file
user#host:~/home/sun$ mv sdir1/mp4/file.mp4 sdir/
user#host:~/home/sun$ mv collection/sdir2/mp4/file.mp4 collection/sdir2/
I suggest you use find and something like
cd /home/sun/sdir1/mp4/
find . -name "*" -exec mv {} /home/sun/sdir1/ \;
cd /home/sun/collection/sdir2/mp4/
find . -name "*" -exec mv {} /home/sun/collection/sdir2/ \;
Alternatively, you could use tar and something like
cd /home/sun/sdir1/mp4/
tar cfp - * | (cd ../ ; tar xvvf -)
# Make sure everything looks good
rm -rf mp4
cd /home/sun/collection/sdir2/mp4/
tar cfp - * | (cd ../ ; tar xvvf -)
# Make sure everything looks good
rm -rf mp4
The command to move a file (or directory) up one level is:
mv /home/sun/sdir1/mp4/file.mp4 ..
Wildcards can be used to select more files & directories, you can also provide more than one directory at a time.
mv /home/sun/sdir1/mp4/*.mp4 /home/sun/collection/sdir2/mp4/*.mp4 ..
Its must be a popular question but I could not find an answer.
How to move all files via * including hidden files as well to parent directory like this:
mv /path/subfolder/* /path/
This will move all files to parent directory like expected but will not move hidden files. How to do that?
You can find a comprehensive set of solutions on this in UNIX & Linux's answer to How do you move all files (including hidden) from one directory to another?. It shows solutions in Bash, zsh, ksh93, standard (POSIX) sh, etc.
You can use these two commands together:
mv /path/subfolder/* /path/ # your current approach
mv /path/subfolder/.* /path/ # this one for hidden files
Or all together (thanks pfnuesel):
mv /path/subfolder/{.,}* /path/
Which expands to:
mv /path/subfolder/* /path/subfolder/.* /path/
(example: echo a{.,}b expands to a.b ab)
Note this will show a couple of warnings:
mv: cannot move ‘/path/subfolder/.’ to /path/.’: Device or resource busy
mv: cannot remove /path/subfolder/..’: Is a directory
Just ignore them: this happens because /path/subfolder/{.,}* also expands to /path/subfolder/. and /path/subfolder/.., which are the directory and the parent directory (See What do “.” and “..” mean when in a folder?).
If you want to just copy, you can use a mere:
cp -r /path/subfolder/. /path/
# ^
# note the dot!
This will copy all files, both normal and hidden ones, since /path/subfolder/. expands to "everything from this directory" (Source: How to copy with cp to include hidden files and hidden directories and their contents?)
I think this is the most elegant, as it also does not try to move ..:
mv /source/path/{.[!.],}* /destination/path
This will move all files to parent directory like expected but will
not move hidden files. How to do that?
You could turn on dotglob:
shopt -s dotglob # This would cause mv below to match hidden files
mv /path/subfolder/* /path/
In order to turn off dotglob, you'd need to say:
shopt -u dotglob
Alternative simpler solution is to use rsync utility:
sudo rsync -vuar --delete-after --dry-run path/subfolder/ path/
Note: Above command will show what is going to be changed. To execute the actual changes, remove --dry-run.
The advantage is that the original folder (subfolder) would be removed as well as part of the command, and when using mv examples here you still need to clean up your folders, not to mention additional headache to cover hidden and non-hidden files in one single pattern.
In addition rsync provides support of copying/moving files between remotes and it would make sure that files are copied exactly as they originally were (-a).
The used -u parameter would skip existing newer files, -r recurse into directories and -v would increase verbosity.
By using the find command in conjunction with the mv command, you can prevent the mv command from trying to move directories (e.g. .. and .) and subdirectories. Here's one option:
find /path/subfolder -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*' -exec mv -n {} /path \;
There are problems with some of the other answers provided. For example, each of the following will try to move subdirectories from the source path:
1) mv /path/subfolder/* /path/ ; mv /path/subfolder/.* /path/
2) mv /path/subfolder/{.,}* /path/
3) mv /source/path/{.[!.],}* /destination/path
Also, 2) includes the . and .. files and 3) misses files like ..foobar, ...barfoo, etc.
You could use, mv /source/path/{.[!.],..?,}* /destination/path, which would include the files missed by 3), but it would still try to move subdirectories. Using the find command with the mv command as I describe above eliminates all these problems.
Let me introduce you to my friend "dotglob". It turns on and off whether or not "*" includes hidden files.
$ mkdir test
$ cd test
$ touch a b c .hidden .hi .den
$ ls -a
. .. .den .hi .hidden a b c
$ shopt -u dotglob
$ ls *
a b c
$ for i in * ; do echo I found: $i ; done
I found: a
I found: b
I found: c
$ shopt -s dotglob
$ ls *
.den .hi .hidden a b c
$ for i in * ; do echo I found: $i ; done
I found: .den
I found: .hi
I found: .hidden
I found: a
I found: b
I found: c
It defaults to "off".
$ shopt dotglob
dotglob off
It is best to turn it back on when you are done otherwise you will confuse things that assume it will be off.
My solution for this problem when I have to copy all the files (including . files) to a target directory retaining the permissions is: (overwrite if already exists)
yes | cp -rvp /source/directory /destination/directory/
yes is for automatically overwriting destination files,
r recursive,
v verbose,
p retain permissions.
Notice that the source path is not ending with a / (so all the files/directory and . files are copied)
Destination directory ends with / as we are placing contents of the source folder to destination as a whole.
Just do
for I in $(ls -A dir)
do
mv dir/$I newDir
done
Assuming you are in the subfolder
run find . -maxdepth 1 -exec mv {} .. \;
I have something like this:
v_1/file.txt
v_2/file.txt
v_3/file.txt
...
and I want to rename those files to something like this:
v_1.txt
v_2.txt
v_3.txt
...
in the same directory.
I guess I can use rename but I can't figure out how to use it with folder and file renaming at the same time.
The result can be achieved with a bash for loop and mv:
for subdir in *; do mv $subdir/file.txt $subdir.txt; done;
Note that the solution above will not work if the directory name contains spaces. Related link.
Another solution based on comments (that works for directories having spaces in the name as well):
find . -type d -not -empty -exec echo mv \{\}/file.txt \{\}.txt \;
You can use rnm. The command would be:
rnm -fo -dp -1 -ns '/pd0/.txt' -ss '\.txt$' /path/to/the/directory
-fo implies file only mode.
-dp directory depth. -1 makes it recursive to all subdirectories.
-ns implies name string i.e the new name of the file.
/pd0/ is the immediate parent directory of the file which is subject to rename operation.
-ss is a search string (regex). '\.txt$' regex searches for file with .txt at the end of the filename.
/path/to/the/directory this is the path where the v_1, v_2 ... directories reside. You can pass the directories ( v_1, v_2 ...) too in place of the parent directory path. For example:
#from inside the parent directory
rnm -fo -dp -1 -ns '/pd0/.txt' -ss '\.txt$' v_*
Seem pretty straightforward to me:
$ mkdir /tmp/sandbox
$ cd /tmp/sandbox
$ mkdir v_{1,2,3}
$ touch v_{1,2,3}/file.txt
$ rename -v 's#/file##' v_{1,2,3}/file.txt
rename v_1/file.txt v_1.txt
rename v_2/file.txt v_2.txt
rename v_3/file.txt v_3.txt
$ ls -F
v_1/ v_1.txt v_2/ v_2.txt v_3/ v_3.txt