I'm slowly learning a little about cli. here's the gateway to my most recent project:

I keep changing distros, and experimenting, mostly in the realm od Debian derivatives. Right now I have five distros on my desktop, All of them are either Ubuntu or Mint ranging from mint10 to mint16., and I still have the home directories of several previous distros. Scattred over all of them I have stories and writings at various stages of development. (I'm not very orderly, But the computer knows where they are.)

I just recenly discovered mlocate, and am learning how to use it. It's very easy to do a search for a keyword, and then using 'cut-and-paste' with nano, to put those complete pathnames into a list inside a text file.

Now (with a lot of help) I have written or adapted several small ascripts, but I'm badly out of my element here. There are several things I'd like to do with those file lists.

For instance one list to delete; another to move all those scattered (but related) files, (renaming if needed to avoid over-writing) to a common directrory.

Any guidance about a really simple and throrough tutorial, or sample scripts I can start with, or....?

We will be glad to help you...so post what you've written/tried so far, and tell us where you're stuck. And there are THOUSANDS of very easily-found scripting tutorials that Google can point you...including one in my posting signature, and many that are already here on LQ (use the search function).
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

There are also many easily-found scripts to move files based on different criteria.

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Sorry to be so sloww markingthis s solved. Don'tknow that it's really possible to "solve" such a vague question,but your tutorials are a great help to me. Thanks.