Question

I’m trying to write a simple script that will move files in a list of sequential files in a directory if one is missing. For instance, if I have a directory with files named “1”, “2”, “3”, “5”, etc, I want to move “3” to “4”, “3” to “2”, etc. I have the following code below. Upper and Lower correspond to the values that I want to shift through. Using the above example, LOWER would be 1 and UPPER would be 5.

 for z in $( eval echo {$UPPER..$LOWER}) ; do          
      checkfile $DIRNAME $z #Returns -1 on file missing
      if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
           echo "Found bad match"
           for y in $( eval echo {$z..$LOWER}) ; do
                n=$(($y - 1))
                echo "$y $n"
                mv "$n" "$y"
           done
           exit 0
      fi  
 done

I receive the following output

Found bad match
18 17
mv: cannot stat `17': No such file or directory
17 16
mv: cannot stat `16': No such file or directory
16 15
mv: cannot stat `15': No such file or directory
15 14
mv: cannot stat `14': No such file or directory

I’m not quite sure why mv is complaining. Any ideas would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

Your mv command is trying to move files in your local directory, but the files you’re checking are elsewhere (in $DIRNAME). Perhaps try mv "$DIRNAME/$n" "$DIRNAME/$y"?