[SOLVED] Bash script to sort files into sub folders based on extension

Issue

I have the following structure:

FolderA
    Sub1
    Sub2
    filexx.csv
    filexx.doc
FolderB
    Sub1
    Sub2
    fileyy.csv
    fileyy.doc

I want to write a script that will move the .csv files into the folder sub1 for each parent directory (Folder A, Folder B and so on) giving me the following structure:

FolderA
    Sub1
        filexx.csv
    Sub2
        filexx.doc

FolderB
    Sub1
        fileyy.csv
    Sub2
        fileyy.doc

This is what I have till now but I get the error mv: cannot stat *.csv: No such file or directory

for f in */*/*.csv; do
    mv -v "$f" */*/Sub1;
done

for f in */*/*.doc; do
    mv -v "$f" */*/Sub2;
done

I am new to bash scripting so please forgive me if I have made a very obvious mistake. I know I can do this in Python as well but it will be lengthier which is why I would like a solution using linux commands.

Solution

I believe you are getting this error because no file matched your wildcard. When it happens, the for loop will give $f the value of the wildcard itself. You are basically trying to move the file *.csv which does not exist.

To prevent this behavior, you can add shopt -s nullglob at the top of your script. When using this, if no file is found, your script won't enter the loop.

My advise is, make sure you run your script from the correct location when using wildcards like this. But maybe what you meant to do by writing */*/*.csv is to recursively match all the csv files. If that's what you intended to do, this is not the right way to do it.

To recursively match all csv/doc/etc files using native bash you can add shopt -s globstar to the top of your script and use **/*.csv as wildcard

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s globstar nullglob

for f in **/*.csv; do
    mv "$f" Destination/  # Note that $f is surrounded by "" to handle whitespaces in filenames
done

You could also use the find (1) utility to achieve that. But if you're planning to do more processing on the files than just moving them, a for loop might be cleaner as you won't have to inline everything in the same command.

Side note : "Linux commands" as you say are actually not Linux commands, they are part of the GNU utilities (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.en.html)

Answered By - ShellCode