I am new to Linux. I am trying to write a shell script which will move files to certain folders based on their extension, like for example in my downloads folder, I have all files of mixed file types. I have written the following script
mv *.mp3 ../Music
mv *.ogg ../Music
mv *.wav ../Music
mv *.mp4 ../Videos
mv *.flv ../Videos
How can I make it run automatically when a file is added to this folder? Now I have to manually run the script each time.
One more question, is there any way of combining these 2 statements
mv *.mp3 ../../Music
mv *.ogg ../../Music
into a single statement? I tried using || (C programming 'or' operator) and comma but they don't seem to work.
There is no trigger for when a file is added to a directory. If the file is uploaded via a webpage, you might be able to make the webpage do it.
You can put a script in crontab to do this, on unix machines (or task schedular in windows). Google crontab for a how-to.
As for combining your commands, use the following:
mv *.mp3 *.ogg ../../Music
You can include as many different "globs" (filenames with wildcards) as you like. The last thing should be the target directory.
Two ways:
find . -name '*mp3' -or -name '*ogg' -print | xargs -J% mv % ../../Musicfind . -name '*mp3' -or -name '*ogg' -exec mv {} ../Music \;
The first uses a pipe and may run out of argument space; while the second may use too many forks and be slower. But, both will work.
incron will watch the filesystem and perform run commands upon certain events.
You can combine multiple commands on a single line by using a command separator. The unconditional serialized command separator is ;.
command1 ; command2
Another way is:
mv -v {*.mp3,*.ogg,*.wav} ../Music
mv -v {*.mp4,*.flv} ../Videos
PS: option -v shows what is going on (verbose).
I like this method:
#!/bin/bash
for filename in *; do
if [[ -f "$filename" ]]; then
base=${filename%.*}
ext=${filename#$base.}
mkdir -p "${ext}"
mv "$filename" "${ext}"
fi
done
