Sorry for my ignorance, but my unix knowledge is limited. I've searched the web for a couple of hours and not found the solution to my problem which I'm sure is solvable with a couple of compounded unix commands.

Here's the situation :

I have a server running Linux with thousands of jpg images in one folder. I want to move a selection of these images to another folder so that I can modify them. I know the names of the files I want to move, I have the filenames in a text file. Is there anyway I can use a mv command to do this, but to get the mv command to read the filenames from my textfile rather than having to enter them manually ?

The folder containing the files is /var/www/file

I want to move the selected files to /var/www/file/temp/m

All help would be gratefully appreciated.

Thanks !

sorry to state the obvious steve.paris, but have you looked at the man pages for both mv and cp ???

because whenever I've wanted to move stuff with CLI i've either just done or I've used cp instead of mv and then just deleted the original file after it's copied over.

I don't know if you'd have to do that a file at a time, or whether you could copy/move whole directories (that might need a switch/arguement or something, but that should be listed in the man page).

I have to presume that you would have got the man pages installed as default during you main install - so theres a link in my sig about how to decypher the man page format if you're unfamiliar with them.

Personally I prefer to log in to root graphically and then just drag and drop the files to where I want them! (child of a "windows world" and all that ).

regards

John

Hi there,

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my message.

To answer your question, Yes, I've been through the man pages for mv and cp, and I can't find a way of passing an array of filenames to the command (I need to move 1000's of files and I'd rather like to avoid doing it one by one...). It is not about moving whole directories, just a selection of files in one directory.

I have the filenames that I need to move in a text file.

I hope this makes my request clearer.

Thanks,

Steve

i've done crap like editing the text file with a word processor or text editor and using find and replace to change each filename into a command. like put a mv at the beginning of each line and the destination directory at the end.

Hi there,

Yes, that could be a work around solution if there is no other way... .

But could you tell me how I could run the thousands of mv commands automatically from the text file ? My Unix knowledge is limited to one command at a time over SSH

Thanks,

Steve

source textfilename

maybe this will make you happy
for i in `cat filename`;do mv "$i" destination; done

try at your own peril

Don't doubt yourself, that's exactly how you do it...

Thanks !!
So, just to be sure (I"ll be doing this "live")... I make my textfile (/var/www/file/filenames.txt) with one filename per line and do (from the directory) and enter the following command :

for i in 'filenames.txt' ;do mv "$i" /var/www/file/temp/m ; done

Is this right ? Thanks so much !

Steve

if you don't use the right thingie ` not ' then it's not gonna work. if you don't type the destination directory correctly, you may delete all the files.

cat text.file |xargs mv --target-directory /YourTargetDirectory

Firstly, I'd like to thank you all who have helped me out on this. I've tried both suggested solutions and the one proposed by whansard works perfectly :

Thanks to you all !

Steve