Question

I have hundreds of text files in a folder named using this kind of naming convention:

Bandname1 - song1.txt
Bandname1 - song2.txt
Bandname2 - song1.txt
Bandname2 - song2.txt
Bandname2 - song3.txt
Bandname3 - song1.txt
..etc.

I would like to create folders for different bands and move according text files into these folders. How could I achieve this using bash, perl or python script?

Answer 1

gregseth‘s answer will work, just replace trim with xargs. You could also eliminate the if test by just using mkdir -p, for example:

for f in *.txt; do
    band=$(echo "$f" | cut -d'-' -f1 | xargs)
    mkdir -p "$band"
    mv "$f" "$band"
done

Strictly speaking the trim or xargs shouldn’t even be necessary, but xargs will at least remove any extra formatting, so it doesn’t hurt.