I need to move in Mac CLI multiple file from multiple different locations to one common target folder (consolidate them).
I have a parent folder, with 10 subdirectories in it, each subdirectory contains one txt file.
I need all txt files in the parent directory.
Sure I can do it manually, but I have the problem more often, often enough with more than 10 occurences.
My attempt so far
find . -type f -iname "*.txt" -exec mv '{}' /Volumes/Extreme\ SSD/Math/Calculus/Calc +
I get this error
find: -exec: no terminating ";" or "+"
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 root folder (03_COMPLETE), inside which are 40 subfolders two levels down (all called CHILD_PNG) that contain .png files I want to rename. There are 6 complete folders I have to go through, with tens of thousands of files. All files are currently named like this: 123456_lifestyle.png, I want them named to lifestyle_123456.png.
My code:
find . -mindepth 2 -type f -iname '*.png' -print0 | xargs -0 /usr/local/bin/rename -v 's/\/([0-9]+)_([A-Za-z]+[0-9])/\/$2_$1/'\;
If I run this on an individual folder of .png files (without using -mindepth) it renames them. However if I run it on the root 03_COMPLETE directory to try and do all the renaming at once, I get lines of errors like this:
Can't rename
'/Volumes/COMMON-LIC-PHOTO/RETOUCHING/04_DELIVERY_PNG/Computer1/03_COMPLETE/06052017_NYS5_W_1263_Output/CHILD_PNG/123456_lifestyle.png'
to
'/Volumes/COMMON-LIC-PHOTO/RETOUCHING/04_DELIVERY_PNG/Computer1/03_COMPLETE/NYS5_06052017_W_1263_Output/CHILD_PNG/123456_lifestyle.png':
No such file or directory
I think it might have something to do with the names of the folder 1 level down (eg. here NYS5_06052017_W_1263_Output) because it did rename on a couple of folders named Bustform_000. Most of the folders though start with a number like 06052017.
I can't figure out why this will work at the .png folder level but won't work on the root folder, and why it will rename in a few folders but most of them it won't.
Also what is weird is that in the error it says it is trying to rename 123456_lifestyle.png to the same filename. Why would it do that? Any ideas?
This might help:
find 03_COMPLETE -type f | xargs -n 1 rename -n 's|/([^_/]*)_([^_/]*).png$|/$2_$1.png|'
Remove -n if output is okay.
You could change directory into each of the CHILD_PNG directories and run a single rename in there on all the files so you don't exec a new rename for every single file:
find 03_COMPLETE -type d -name CHILD_PNG -execdir bash -c "cd {}; rename -n '...' *.png" \;
The issue with your original Regex is, it matches the directory names of the form "xxxxx_yyyyy" and tries to convert them into "yyyyy_xxxxx", which, of course, doesn't exist. Since you're interested in changing only the filenames, and all of them end with .png, you can use the below Regex. Additionally, as you're trying to match a literal '/', you can choose a different character like '|' as delimiter to make the Regex easier to read
's|/([0-9]+)_([A-Za-z]+[0-9]*)(\.[Pp][Nn][Gg])|/$2_$1$3|'
On my Mac I amm trying to move hundreds of files on my NAS drive, from a parent directory with a load of subdirectories (and possibly directories inside them) and put all of the files into one folder.
They don't have the same file extension for all the files.
Is anyone able to help with the terminal command I need to do this? So far I know that find . -type f will list all the files in the directory and subdirectories but Im unsure how to tell it to get them to move them all into another folder.
For anyone else who may have this same issue:
Ive managed to extract just the .jpg's and put them in the parent folder.
find . -type f -iname '*.jpg' -mindepth 2 -print0 | xargs -0 -I{} mv -n '{}' .
Not quite what I wanted - I was hoping to get every single file and put it into a completely different folder if possible but this has got me further than before.
Go inside the source parent directory and use:
find . -type f -exec mv "$PWD"/{} <destination directory> \;
If you want to move all the files to parent directory itself, use it as the destination directory.
I have a complicated scenario. In my current working directory, I have several subdirectories. Each subdirectory has a number of files, but I'm only interested in one: RAxML_bestTree.best. The file name is the same for each corresponding file in every subdirectory, i.e., they are not unique. Thus, a copy command to a new subdirectory will not work since one RAxML_bestTree.best will be shown and overwritten 514 times.
I need to take the content of each subdirectory's RAxML_bestTree.best and have it placed into a file all_RAxML_bestTrees.txt either in the current working directory or a new subdirectory. I have tried the following, which appears to print the contents to screen but not to file:
find . -type f -name \RAxML_bestTree.best -exec cat {} all_RAxML_bestTrees.txt \;
Nevermind, found my issue:
find . -type f -name \RAxML_bestTree.best -exec cat > all_RAxML_bestTrees.txt \;
I was searching unsuccessfully for a solution to delete all the files inside a working directory except for the subdirectories inside.
I found a way to delete all the files inside all the directories, but I'm looking for a way to delete only the files on the same "level" I'm on.
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm
The find command recursively searches a directory for files and folders that match the specified expressions.
-maxdepth 1 will only search the current level (when used with . or the top level when a directory is used instead), effectively turning of the recursive search feature
-type f specifies only files, and all files
#chepner recommended an improvement on the above to simply use
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -delete
Not sure why I didn't think of it in the first place but anyway.
I think it is as easy as this:
$ rm *
when inside the working directory.
I've tested it and it worked - it deleted all files in the working directory and didn't affected any files inside any subdirectory.
Keep in mind, that it if you want to remove hidden files as well, then you need:
$ rm * .*