Question

I am trying to write a bash script that goes through a file line by line (ignoring the header), extracts a file name from the beginning of each line, and then finds a file by this name in one directory and moves it to another directory. I will be processing hundreds of these files in a loop and moving over a million individual files. A sample of the file is:

ImageFileName    Left_Edge_Longitude    Right_Edge_Longitude   Top_Edge_Latitude  Bottom_Edge_Latitude

21088_82092.jpg:  -122.08007812500000  -122.07733154296875    41.33763821961143    41.33557596965434

21088_82093.jpg:  -122.08007812500000  -122.07733154296875    41.33970040427444    41.33763821961143

21088_82094.jpg:  -122.08007812500000  -122.07733154296875    41.34176252364274    41.33970040427444

I would like to ignore the first line and then grab 21088_82092.jpg as a variable. File names may not always be the same length, but they will always have the format digits_digits.jpg

Any help for an efficient approach is much appreciated.

Answer 1

This should get you started:

$ tail -n +2 input | cut -f 1 -d: | while read file; do test -f $dir/$file && mv -v $dir/$file $destination; done