Question

I have several thousand ebooks that need to be organized on a headless linux server running bash through SSH. All of the ebooks are thankfully named with one of 2 conventions.

• AuthorFirstName AuthorLastName – Book Title.pdf
• AuthorFirstName AuthorLastName – Book Series #inSeries – Book
  Title.pdf

What I would like to do is to move all of the books into an organized system such as:

`DestinationDirectory/FirstLetterOfAuthorFirstName/Author Full Name/pdf's`

e.g. the following books

Andrew Weiner - Changes.pdf 
Allan Cole - Timura Trilogy 01 - When the Gods Slept.pdf

should be placed in the following folders

/books/A/Allan Cole/Allan Cole - Timura Trilogy 01 - When the Gods Slept.pdf
/books/A/Andrew Weiner/Andrew Weiner - Changes.pdf

I need help with how to put this all into a bash script that will grab the filenames of all the PDF files in the current directory, and then move the files to the proper directory, creating the directory if it doesn’t already exist.

Answer 1

for f in *.pdf; do
    name=`echo "$f"|sed 's/ -.*//'`
    letter=`echo "$name"|cut -c1`
    dir="DestinationDirectory/$letter/$name"
    mkdir -p "$dir"
    mv "$f" "$dir"
done