Question

Suppose a particular command generates few files (I dont know the name of these files). I want to move those files into a new folder. How to do it in shell script?

i can’t use :

#!/bin/bash
mkdir newfolder
command 
mv * newfolder

as the cwd contains lot of other files as well.

Answer 1

The first question is can you just run command with newfolder as the current directory to generate the files in the right place it begin with:

mkdir newfolder
cd newfolder
command 

Or if command is not in the path:

mkdir newfolder
cd newfolder
../command 

If you can’t do this then you’ll need to capture lists of before and after files and compare. An inelegant way of doing this would be as follows:

# Make sure before.txt is in the before list so it isn't in the list of new files
touch before.txt

# Capture the files before the command
ls -1 > before.txt

# Run the command
command

# Capture the list of files after
ls -1 > after.txt

# Use diff to compare the lists, only printing new entries
NEWFILES=`diff --old-line-format="" --unchanged-line-format="" --new-line-format="%l " before.txt after.txt`

# Remove our temporary files
rm before.txt after.txt

# Move the files to the new folder
mkdir newfolder
mv $NEWFILES newfolder