I am trying to use the find command to gather files with a variable name as part of the title and move them to another directory. It is a loop variable representing an array, like so
for i in "${array[#]}"; do
find -name "${i}r.TXT" -a -name "${i}f.TXT" -execdir mv '{}' logs/ \;
done
The directory I am trying to move them to is a subdirectory of my current working directory, named logs. What is the correct way to integrate the variable into the filename so that find will grab the correct files and move them to the logs directory?
The elements of the array are integers, like 50, 55, 60, 65, so on and I want files that are 50f, 50r, 55f, 55r, etc.
As pointed out in the comments, -a was the problem here. find -name 1 -a -name 2 is the same as find -name 1 -name 2 and will never print anything because the name cannot be 1 and 2 at the same time. You could use -o instead, but there is a simplier solution:
Use find -name "${i}[fr].TXT" to find the files 50f.TXT and 50r.TXT when i=50.
Please note Gordon Davisson's comment:
find searches subdirectories (and subsubdirectories and ...), so it may find the files in the current directory, move them down into logs/, then find them again in logs/, move them down into logs/logs/ (or at least try to), etc
To prevent this, you can exclude directories named log by adding -name logs -prune -o as the first arguments to find.
However, if all your files are in the current working directory you don't need find at all.
Globs can do the same:
shopt -s failglob
for i in "${array[#]}"; do
mv "${i}"[fr].TXT logs/
done
Failglob will print an error message if no matching file was found. You can leave it out, but then the resulting command mv logs/ will print an error message.
Related
This is my directory structure
find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -t
./lisst.txt ./SAMN03272855/SRR1734376/SRR1734376_1.fastq.gz
./SAMN03272854/SRR1734375/SRR1734375_2.fastq.gz ./SAMN07605670/SRR6006890/SRR6006890_2.fastq.gz
./SAMN03272854/SRR1734375/SRR1734375_1.fastq.gz ./SAMN07605670/SRR6006890/SRR6006890_1.fastq.gz
./SAMN03272855/SRR1734376/SRR1734376_2.fastq.gz
So this is a small subset of my folder/files where i have around 70.
I have a made a list of files which i want to keep and other i would like to delete.
My list.txt contains SAMN03272854,SAMN03272855 but I want to remove SAMN07605670.
I ran this
find . ! -name 'lisst.txt' -type d -exec rm -vrf {} +
It removed everything
QUESTION UPDATE
In my list it contains the folder i want to keep and the one which are not there are to be removed.
The folders which are to be removed also contains subdirectories and files. I want to remove everything
Your command selects each directory in the tree, except a directories of the funny name lisst.txt. Once it finds a directory, you do a recursive remove of this directory. No surprise that your files are gone.
You can't use rm -r when you want to spare certain files from deletion. This means that you also can't remove a directory, which somewhere below in its subtree has a file you want to keep.
I would run two find commands: The first removes all the files, ignoring directories, and second one removes all directories, which are empty (bottom-up). Assuming that SAMN03272854 is indeed a file (as you told us in your question), this would be:
find . -type f \( ! \( -name SAMN03272854 -o -name SAMN03272855 \) \) -exec rm {}
find . -depth -type d -exec rmdir {} 2>/dev/null
The error redirection in the latter command suppresses messages from rmdir for directories which still contain files you want to keep. Of course other messages are also suppressed. I would during debugging run the command without error redirection, to see whether it is basically correct.
Things would get more complicated, if you have files and directories to keep, because to keep a directory likely implies to keep all the files below it. In this case, you can use the -prune option of find, which excludes directories including their subdirectories from being processed. See the find man page, which gives examples for this.
I have a zip file named agent-20.1.80.8366.zip, when I extract this zip it is giving additional directory inside the parent dir like below:
agent-20.1.80.8366/agent-20.1.80.8366/files
I would like to extract and move files from child directory to it's parent directory and remove that empty child directory and then I want to pass that path as a variable.
Please someone help with bash snippet that should strictly validate and proceed, and then parent path should be stored in a variable
expected output to be:
agent-20.1.80.8366/files
$ mv agent-20.1.80.8366/agent-20.1.80.8366/files agent-20.1.80.8366/files
$ rmdir agent-20.1.80.8366/agent-20.1.80.8366
This will fail if agent-20.1.80.8366/agent-20.1.80.8366 is not empty, which imo is a good thing, since you are assuming that it will empty if files is moved.
Using find to first move the file up one level
find agent-20.1.80.8366/agent-20.1.80.8366 -type f -execdir mv -f '{}' .. \;
Then using find to remove the remaining directory
find agent-20.1.80.8366 -type d -name "agent-20.1.80.8366" -delete
I would like to know how to deleted all the contents of a folder (it contains other folders and some files) except for 2 folders and its contents
The below command keeps the folder conf and removes all the other folders
find . ! -name 'conf' -type d -exec rm -rf {} +
I have tried to pipe it like below
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -name 'conf' |find . -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -name 'foldername2'
but didnt work.
is it possible to do with a single command
You haven't specified which shell you're using, but if you're using bash then extended globs can help:
printf '%s\n' !(#(conf|foldername2)/)
If you're happy with the list of files and directories produced by that, then pass the same glob to rm -rf:
rm -rf !(#(conf|foldername2)/)
Inside a script, you may need to enable extglob using shopt -s extglob. Later, you can change -s to -u to unset the option.
If you're using a different shell, then you can add some more options to your find command:
find -maxdepth 1 ! -name 'conf' -a ! -name 'foldername2' -exec rm -rf {} +
Try it without the -exec part first to print the matches rather than deleting everything.
It may my little program utility can help you. I hope so.
First of all you should find the path of your files .sh
then you should find the main folder that contains those files .sh
then remove anything except those folders
I wrote drr for such a purpose that it can do such a task so easy
drr, stands for: remove or rename files based on regular expression in D language. So you must compile it before using.
See the screenshot:
Please be careful since this is not an appropriate tool for beginner.
I have a folder called "week1", and in that folder there are about ten other folders that all contain multiple files, including one called "submit.pdf". I would like to be able to copy all of the "submit.pdf" files into one folder, ideally using Terminal to expedite the process. I've tried cp week1/*/submit.pdf week1/ as well as cp week1/*/*.pdf week1/, but it had only been ending up copying one file. I just realized that it has been writing over each file every time which is why I'm stuck with one...is there anyway I can prevent that from happening?
You don't indicate your OS, but if you're using Gnu cp, you can use cp week1/*/submit.pdf --backup=t week/ to have it (arbitrarily) number files that already exist; but, that won't give you any real way to identify which-is-which.
You could, perhaps, do something like this:
for file in week1/*/submit.pdf; do cp "$file" "${file//\//-}"; done
… which will produce files named something like "week1-subdir-submit.pdf"
For what it's worth, the "${var/s/r}" notation means to take var, but before inserting its value, search for s (\/, meaning /, escaped because of the other special / in that expression), and replace it with r (-), to make the unique filenames.
Edit: There's actually one more / in there, to make it match multiple times, making the syntax:
"${ var / / \/ / - }"
take "var" replace every instance of / with -
find to the rescue! Rule of thumb: If you can list the files you want with find, you can copy them. So try first this:
$ cd your_folder
$ find . -type f -iname 'submit.pdf'
Some notes:
find . means "start finding from the current directory"
-type -f means "only find regular files" (i.e., not directories)
-iname 'submit.pdf' "... with case-insensitive name 'submit.dpf'". You don't need to use 'quotation', but if you want to search using wildcards, you need to. E.g.:
~ foo$ find /usr/lib -iname '*.So*'
/usr/lib/pam/pam_deny.so.2
/usr/lib/pam/pam_env.so.2
/usr/lib/pam/pam_group.so.2
...
If you want to search case-sensitive, just use -name instead of -iname.
When this works, you can copy each file by using the -exec command. exec works by letting you specify a command to use on hits. It will run the command for each file find finds, and put the name of the file in {}. You end the sequence of commands by specifying \;.
So to echo all the files, do this:
$ find . -type f -iname submit.pdf -exec echo Found file {} \;
To copy them one by one:
$ find . -type f -iname submit.pdf -exec cp {} /destination/folder \;
Hope this helps!
I am horrible at writing bash scripts, but I'm wondering if it's possible to recursively loop through a directory and rename all the files in there by "1.png", "2.png", etc, but I need it to restart at one for every new folder it enters. Here's script that works but only does it for one directory.
cd ./directory
cnt=1
for fname in *
do
mv $fname ${cnt}.png
cnt=$(( $cnt + 1 ))
done
Thanks in advance
EDIT
Can anyone actually write this code out? I have no idea how to write bash, and it's very confusing to me
Using find is a great idea. You can use find with the next syntax to find all directories inside your directory and apply your script to found directories:
find /directory -type d -exec youscript.sh {} \;
-type d parameter means you want to find only directories
-exec youscript.sh {} \; starts your script for every found directory and pass it this directory name as a parameter
Use find(1) to get a list of files, and then do whatever you like with that list.