Question

HI, I’m completely new to Bash and StackOverflow.

I need to move a set of files (all contained in the same folder) to a target folder where files with the same name could already exist.

In case a specific file exists, I need to rename the file before moving it, by appending for example an incremental integer to the file name.

The extensions should be preserved (in other words, that appended incremental integer should go before the extension). The file names could contain dots in the middle.

Originally, I was thinking about comparing the two folders to have a list of the existing files (I did this with “comm”), but then I got a bit stuck. I think I’m just trying to do things in the most complicated possible way.

Any hint to do this in the “bash way”? It’s OK if it is done in a script other than bash script.

Answer 1

As per OP, this can be Perl, not just bash. Here we go

NEW SOLUTION: (paying attention to extension)

~/junk/a1$ ls
f1.txt   f2.txt   f3.txt   z1       z2


~/junk/a1$ ls ../a2
f1.txt     f2.1.txt   f2.2.txt   f2.3.txt   f2.txt     z1

# I split the one-liner into multiple lines for readability
$ perl5.8 -e 
     '{use strict; use warnings; use File::Copy; use File::Basename; 
       my @files = glob("*"); # assume current directory
       foreach my $file (@files) {
           my $file_base2 = basename($file); 
           my ($file_base, $ext) = ($file_base2 =~ /(.+?)([.][^.]+$)?$/);
           my $new_file_base = "../a2/$file_base";
           my $new_file = $new_file_base . $ext; 
           my $counter = 1;
           while (-e $new_file) { 
               $new_file = "$new_file_base." . $counter++ . $ext;
           }
           copy($file, $new_file)
               || die "could not copy $file to $new_file: $!\n";
        } }'

~/junk/a1> ls ../a2
f1.1.txt f1.txt  f2.1.txt  f2.2.txt  f2.3.txt  f2.4.txt  f2.txt  f3.txt
z1         z1.1       z2

OLD SOLUTION: (not paying attention to extension)

~/junk/a1$ ls
f1   f2   f3

~/junk/a1$ ls ../a2
f1     f2     f2.1   f2.2   f2.3

# I split the one-liner into multiple lines for readability
$ perl5.8 -e 
     '{use strict; use warnings; use File::Copy; use File::Basename; 
       my @files = glob("*"); # assume current directory
       foreach my $file (@files) {
           my $file_base = basename($file); 
           my $new_file_base = "../a2/$file_base"; 
           my $new_file = $new_file_base; 
           my $counter = 1;
           while (-e $new_file) { $new_file = "$new_file_base." . $counter++; }
           copy($file,$new_file)
               || die "could not copy $file to $new_file: $!\n";
        } }'

~/junk/a1> ls ../a2
f1     f1.1   f2     f2.1   f2.2   f2.3   f2.4   f3