Question

I have thousands of mp3s inside a complex folder structure which resides within a single folder. I would like to move all the mp3s into a single directory with no subfolders. I can think of a variety of ways of doing this using the find command but one problem will be duplicate file names. I don’t want to replace files since I often have multiple versions of a same song. Auto-rename would be best. I don’t really care how the files are renamed.

Does anyone know a simple and safe way of doing this?

Answer 1

You could change a a/b/c.mp3 path into a - b - c.mp3 after copying. Here’s a solution in Bash:

find srcdir -name '*.mp3' -printf '%P\n' |
    while read i; do
        j="${i//\// - }"
        cp -v "srcdir/$i" "dstdir/$j"
    done

And in a shell without ${//} substitution:

find srcdir -name '*.mp3' -printf '%P\n' |
    sed -e 'p;s:/: - :g' |
    while read i; do
        read j
        cp -v "srcdir/$i" "dstdir/$j"
    done

For a different scheme, GNU’s cp and mv can make numbered backups instead of overwriting — see -b/--backup[=CONTROL] in the man pages.

find srcdir -name '*.mp3' -exec cp -v --backup=numbered {} dstdir/ \;