excluding files and 'mv'

surfbass · 07-15-2006, 04:13 PM

What if I have a directory that has half the files .tar.bz2 and the rest would be a mix of directories, and numerous of extensions. How could I move all these 'mixed' files to another directory? I want to move all of them except the .tar.bz2. What would the command string be? I looked in the man pages but I couldn't find anything. Any tips?

Tinkster · 07-15-2006, 04:28 PM

find -not -name "*.tar.bz2" -exec mv {} /path/to/new/home \;

Cheers,
Tink

druuna · 07-15-2006, 04:30 PM

Hi,

You could try something like this:

mv `ls | grep -v tar.bz2` /new/location

The part between the backticks (ls | grep -v tar.bz2) is executed first, this should give you all the files/dirs except tar.bz2 file. These are give to mv and moved to /new/location.

Try the ls part first, before feeding the output to mv.

Hope this helps.

Matir · 07-15-2006, 07:59 PM

Tinkster's find will probably work better, but will NOT preserve a directory structure. Druuna's command would also discard any file with 'tar.bz2' ANYWHERE in the filename, not just at the end (admittedly an unlikely occurance). To 'anchor' the pattern to the end, try

Code:

mv `ls | grep -v 'tar.bz2$'` /destination

. The $ requires it to also match the end of each filename. To include hidden files, add -A to the ls.