Question

I’m trying to move media and other files which are in a specified directory to another directory and create another one if it does not exits (where the files will go), and create a directory the remaining files with different extensions will go. My first problem is that my script is not making a new directory and it is not moving the files to other directories and what code can I use to move files with different extensions to one directory?

This is what i have had so far, correct me where I’m wrong and help modify my script:

#!/bin/bash
From=/home/katy/doc
To=/home/katy/mo #directory where the media files will go
WA=/home/katy/do # directory where the other files will go
 if [ ! -d "$To" ]; then
   mkdir -p "$To"
 fi
cd $From
find path -type f -name"*.mp4" -exec mv {} $To \;

Answer 1

I’d solve it somewhat like this:

#!/bin/bash
From=/home/katy/doc
To=/home/katy/mo # directory where the media files will go
WA=/home/katy/do # directory where the other files will go

cd "$From"
find . -type f \
| while read file; do
    dir="$(dirname "$file")"
    base="$(basename "$file")"
    if [[ "$file" =~ \.mp4$ ]]; then
      target="$To"
    else
      target="$WA"
    fi
    mkdir -p "$target/$dir"
    mv -i "$file" "$target/$dir/$base"
  done

Notes:

• mkdir -p will not complain if the directory already exists, so there’s no need to check for that.
• Put double quotes around all filenames in case they contain spaces.
• By piping the output of find into a while loop, you also avoid getting bitten by spaces, because read will read until a newline.
• You can modify the regex according to taste, e.g. \.(mp3|mp4|wma|ogg)$.
• In case you didn’t know, $(...) will run the given command and stick its output back in the place of the $(...) (called command substitution). It is almost the same as `...` but slightly better (details).
• In order to test it, put echo in front of mv. (Note that quotes will disappear in the output.)