Question

A legacy web application I’ve inherited control over seems to have hit the maximum number of subdirectories in a folder on my web server. Whenever an article is created in the system, it’s static content is placed in a subdirectory of the document root matching the pattern /uploads/story/{STORY_ID}/. But now the system is unable to create any new directories in the /uploads/story/ folder.

I’d like to address this in 2 steps, but I’m not sure how to run the necessary linux commands to achieve this. Would you be able to help?

1. As a temporary fix to buy me more time to implement a better directory structure, I’d like to archive the static content of all stories with a STORY_ID of less than 1000. These should be moved from /uploads/story/ to /uploads/story_archive/.

2. I’ll change the upload path to be /uploads/story/{THOUSANDS}/{STORY_ID}/ in the code, but will need to be able to move all folders within /uploads/story/ into this format. e.g. /uploads/story/65312/ would become /uploads/story/65/65312/. How can I do this?

Edit

Fixing (1) was as simple as running:

$ cd /path/to/uploads/
$ mkdir story_archive
$ for i in {1..999}; do mv story/$i story_archive/; done

Answer 1

Given that you are sure /uploads/story/* will give you a number in the * part, you can do the following (Note: backup the whole thing just in case):

# update this based on your actual directory
path_to_fix=/uploads/stories

# move the directories out of the way so they don't get mixed up
mv $path_to_fix $path_to_fix/../temp
mkdir $path_to_fix > /dev/null 2>&1

# get all directories to be moved
dirs=$(ls $path_to_fix/../temp)

# for each of them
for d in $dirs; do
  # get the basename, which is store_id
  id=$(basename $d)
  # divide by 1000
  sub=$((id / 1000))
  # create the appropriate directory
  mkdir $path_to_fix/$sub > /dev/null 2>&1
  # move the original directory to that sub-directory
  mv $path_to_fix/../temp/$d $path_to_fix/$sub
done

# cleanup
rm -Rf $path_to_fix/../temp