Move Files containing specific text in terminal

[adam17]

Hi, I am able to move files around from one place to another in the terminal, however I have a massive collection of audio files that I would like to sort and move by the album title.

for example: my file names in the music folder consist of - Artist Album Trk# Title

In the terminal I imagine the command would look something like this:

sudo mv /home/user/Music/*Album /home/user/Music/Album\ Title

I know this doesnt work but could someone please help it would make the whole process a lot easier.

Thanks.

[steeldriver]

Are you trying to move them to a different directory location, or rename them? Are the files all in one directory, or in subdirectories?

It would help if you gave some specific examples.

[adam17]

Hi Sorry,

Right I have files for example 9 files: file album-afi1.mp3 album-afi2.mp3 album-afi3.mp3 album-bfs1.mp3 album-bfs2.mp3 album-bfs3.mp3 album-cod1.mp3 album-cod2.mp3 album-cod3.mp3

I want to move files album-afi1.mp3 album-afi2.mp3 album-afi3.mp3 to folder afi

Then move files album-bfs1,2&3.mp3 to folder bfs

album-cod1,2,3.mp3 to folder cod

ect.

so if files album-afi1.mp3 album-afi2.mp3 album-afi3.mp3 album-bfs1.mp3 album-bfs2.mp3 album-bfs3.mp3 album-cod1.mp3 album-cod2.mp3 album-cod3.mp3 are in /home/adam/Music/All

and I want to move just the files that contain afi from all to /home/adam/Music/AFI

the command I tried was sudo mv /home/adam/Music/All/*afi* /home/adam/Music/AFI
move all containing afi to folder called AFI

hope this make sense.

Thanks

[steeldriver]

The -t target form of the mv command is handy for situations like this where you want to move multiple source files to one destination.

       -t, --target-directory=DIRECTORY
              move all SOURCE arguments into DIRECTORY

If the target directories already exist, you should be able to do something like

mv -t /home/adam/Music/AFI/ /home/adam/Music/All/*afi*

or (if you want to restrict the match more precisely)

mv -t /home/adam/Music/AFI/ /home/adam/Music/All/album-afi*.mp3

or even (to match only names that have one or more digits after the afi)

mv -t /home/adam/Music/AFI/ /home/adam/Music/All/album-afi+([0-9]).mp3

and so on. If the directories don't already exist, there are ways of generating them progamatically (i.e. by chopping up the filenames) but that's a bit more complicated.

EDIT: and no need to use sudo if the files and target directories are under your own home dir

[adam17]

Thanks, I think I understand.

Why does this method apear to be in reverse?

When moving files previously I have used the mv /existing/file.to /new/location
where as your method seems to be the reverse.

is there a difference?

is it to do with the target directory bit at the start?

thanks

[llamabr]

Also, notice that it's unlikely that you must begin this command with sudo. Unless you know why you should, we'll probably advise against it.

[Vaphell]

Thanks, I think I understand.

Why does this method apear to be in reverse?

When moving files previously I have used the mv /existing/file.to /new/location
where as your method seems to be the reverse.

is there a difference?

is it to do with the target directory bit at the start?

thanks

it should work if you switch places but the common convention is -options first (-t dir here), arbitrary number of items to process at the end. That makes it easy to determine at a glance what the command is supposed to do. "A-ha! -t dir, so it gathers a bunch of files and moves them in bulk at once to dir!".
Options often introduce huge differences and having to look for switches all over the place, potentially even at the end, would be a massive pain.

[adam17]

Thanks for the help.