How can I copy all my disorganized files into a single directory? (on linux) - bash

Question

I have thousands of mp3s inside a complex folder structure which resides within a single folder. I would like to move all the mp3s into a single directory with no subfolders. I can think of a variety of ways of doing this using the find command but one problem will be duplicate file names. I don't want to replace files since I often have multiple versions of a same song. Auto-rename would be best. I don't really care how the files are renamed.
Does anyone know a simple and safe way of doing this?

Answer 1

You could change a a/b/c.mp3 path into a - b - c.mp3 after copying. Here's a solution in Bash:
find srcdir -name '*.mp3' -printf '%P\n' |
while read i; do
j="${i//\// - }"
cp -v "srcdir/$i" "dstdir/$j"
done
And in a shell without ${//} substitution:
find srcdir -name '*.mp3' -printf '%P\n' |
sed -e 'p;s:/: - :g' |
while read i; do
read j
cp -v "srcdir/$i" "dstdir/$j"
done
For a different scheme, GNU's cp and mv can make numbered backups instead of overwriting -- see -b/--backup[=CONTROL] in the man pages.
find srcdir -name '*.mp3' -exec cp -v --backup=numbered {} dstdir/ \;

Answer 2

bash like pseudocode:
for i in `find . -name "*.mp3"`; do
NEW_NAME = `basename $i`
X=0
while ! -f move_to_dir/$NEW_NAME
NEW_NAME = $NEW_NAME + incr $X
mv $i $NEW_NAME
done

Answer 3

#!/bin/bash
NEW_DIR=/tmp/new/
IFS="
"; for a in `find . -type f `
do
echo "$a"
new_name="`basename $a`"
while test -e "$NEW_DIR/$new_name"
do
new_name="${new_name}_"
done
cp "$a" "$NEW_DIR/$new_name"
done

Answer 4

I'd tend to do this in a simple script rather than try to fit in in a single command line.
For instance, in python, it would be relatively trivial to do a walk() through the directory, copying each mp3 file found to a different directory with an automatically incremented number.
If you want to get fancier, you could have a dictionary of existing file names, and simply append a number to the duplicates. (the index of the dictionary being the file name, and the value being the number of files found so far, which would become your suffix)

Answer 5

find /path/to/mp3s -name *.mp3 -exec mv \{\} /path/to/target/dir \;

Answer 6

At the risk of many downvotes, a perl script could be written in short time to accomplish this.
Pseudocode:
while (-e filename)
change filename to filename . "1";

Answer 7

In python: to actually move the file, change debug=False
import os, re
from_dir="/from/dir"
to_dir = "/target/dir"
re_ext = "\.mp3"
debug = True
w = os.walk(from_dir)
n = w.next()
while n:
d, arg, names = n
names = filter(lambda fn: re.match(".*(%s)$"%re_ext, fn, re.I) , names)
n = w.next()
for fn in names:
from_fn = os.path.join(d,fn)
target_fn = os.path.join(to_dir, fn)
file_exists = os.path.exists(target_fn)
if not debug:
if not file_exists:
os.rename(from_fn, target_fn)
else:
print "DO NOT MOVE - FILE EXISTS ", from_fn
else:
print "MOVE ", from_fn, " TO " , target_fn

Answer 8

Since you don't care how the duplicate files are named, utilize the 'backup' option on move:
find /path/to/mp3s -name *.mp3 -exec mv --backup=numbered {} /path/to/target/dir \;
Will get you:
song.mp3
song.mp3.~1~
song.mp3.~2~