Moving files with wildcard - mv -r doesn't work and cp keeps original copy..

cilbuper · 11-22-2015, 11:18 PM

Ok, so what I want ot do is take all files, say *.mp3 from all sub folders within a folder.

Let's say the folder is /home/user/music and there are 100's of sub-folders in music. I want to move all the files to /home/user/mp3

I know that

Code:

mv -rfv /home/user/music/*.mp3 /home/user/mp3

doesn't work as no usage or "r" works with the mv command.

Is there a way to do this? I want to move all mp3, wma, ogg and others to a destination folder.

Also, I have tried using the copy command (with R and r)

Code:

$ cp -Rfv /home/user/music/*.mp3 home/user/mp3/

I know I have successfully copied specific files, recursively, from within a folder and sub-folders to another folder, but can't seem to figure it out again.

Can anyone here help with this?

berndbausch · 11-23-2015, 12:30 AM

You can list all MP3 files and copy them to /home/user/mp3. There are various ways to do this:

Code:

find /home/user/music -name '*.mp3' -exec mv {} /home/user/mp3 \;

will work but may be slow because for each move, you start a new mv process.

Code:

mv $(find /home/user/music -name '*.mp3') /home/user/mp3

may work, but if there are too many MP3s, the command line may be too long and the command fail. So:

Code:

find /home/user/music -name '*.mp3' | xargs -I file mv file /home/user/mp3

Fourth option: Find also has a "+" operator after the -exec option; since I don't know it by heart, please look it up in the man page.

As an exercise, read the man pages for find and xargs to figure out what all that means.

TobiSGD · 11-23-2015, 04:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by berndbausch

You can list all MP3 files and copy them to /home/user/mp3. There are various ways to do this:

Code:

find /home/user/music -name '*.mp3' -exec mv {} /home/user/mp3 \;

will work but may be slow because for each move, you start a new mv process.

Using

Code:

find /home/user/music -name '*.mp3' -exec mv {} /home/user/mp3 +

instead will minimize that problem.
If you happen to use Zsh instead of Bash all you need to do is this:

Code:

mv -v /home/user/music/**/*.mp3 /home/user/mp3

if you have the extended_glob option set in your .zshrc.

serverpoint.com · 11-27-2015, 07:49 AM

Hi,

Try this

find source -name "*.xxx" -exec mv -i {} -t ~/dst \;

Where *.xxx is your file extension and ~/dst is the destination path.

cilbuper · 12-09-2015, 06:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TobiSGD

Using

Code:

find /home/user/music -name '*.mp3' -exec mv {} /home/user/mp3 +

instead will minimize that problem.
If you happen to use Zsh instead of Bash all you need to do is this:

Code:

mv -v /home/user/music/**/*.mp3 /home/user/mp3

if you have the extended_glob option set in your .zshrc.

Thanks for the suggestion/tip. I did something like this on my OS and i'm not sure I ever installed Zsh (is that standard on Kubuntu 14.10?). This will work well once i get the other aspect of the problem working as well.

If I have a folder, with say 10 sub folders. Each subfoler has an archive set or rars (or possibly zips, but most likely rars). Instead of having to navigate to each folder, right clicc and select "extract here", is there a way to do every rar within a subfolder? I had this done before as well but I just can't seem to get the syntax correct or possibly commands. Once the file is extracted I can use the command that you posted above to scavenge the folders for the file types that I want to move to a permanent location.

chrism01 · 12-09-2015, 06:37 PM

Something like this ?

Code:

cd topdir
for subdir in $(find . -type d)
do
    cd $subdir
    for file in *.rar
    do
        unrar $file
    done
done

NB UNTESTED...

TobiSGD · 12-10-2015, 04:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrism01

Something like this ?

Code:

cd topdir
for subdir in $(find . -type d)
do
    cd $subdir
    for file in *.rar
    do
        unrar e $file
    done
done

NB UNTESTED...

Minor fix, unrar needs you to specify a command, either use the e or the x command, depending if preserving paths when unpacking is necessary.