Bash question

[XerXeX]

Hi, how come I can successfully manage to move large amount of files if I simply type a for loop in a terminal like this:

for i in *{0001..3333}*; do mv $i reel_1/; done

but fail if I make a bash script as such;

for i in *{$1..$2}*
do
mv $i $3
done

mover.sh 0001 3333 reel_1/

What have I missed? Thanks!

[roccivic]

I don't know why your code doesn't work...

But consider the following:


#!/bin/bash

for ((i=$1;i<$2;i++)); do
mv $i $3
done

[XerXeX]

Thanks roccivic,

Unfortunately the files that I need to move are large tiff sequences that are usually named "movie_title0001.tiff" or similar. That is why I have to use wildcards *{0001..3333}* to filter out everything but the number and then move the sequences into respective folder.

As I said, everything works fine as long as I type it in a terminal. I cannot figure out why the same would fail as a bash script...!

[r-senior]

Is it definitely a bash script? Did you put #!/bin/bash at the top? I don't know dash (which is what /bin/sh links to by default) but I'm thinking it may not expand the '..' the same way as bash?

[Vaphell]

it's simple
bash expands that pattern BEFORE variable substitution, it doesn't see 0001..3333 there but $a and $b
It's not trivial to parametrize {..}, i can think of one ugly hack that will do that, using eval.

but there is still hope

a=1; b=5; c=xxx
for i in $( seq -f "%04g" $a $b )
do
echo mv my_porn${i}.tiff $c
done

result:

mv my_porn0001.tiff xxx
mv my_porn0002.tiff xxx
mv my_porn0003.tiff xxx
mv my_porn0004.tiff xxx
mv my_porn0005.tiff xxx


as you can imagine %04g controls the padding with zeroes to 4 digits

[XerXeX]

Is it definitely a bash script? Did you put #!/bin/bash at the top?

Yes r-senior, it is a bash script, I just didn't wrap code tags around the script. Here is the full (non-working) script:



#!/bin/bash

for i in *{$1..$2}*
do
mv $i $3
done



it's simple
bash expands that pattern BEFORE variable substitution, it doesn't see 0001..3333 there but $a and $b
It's not trivial to parametrize {..}, i can think of one ugly hack that will do that, using eval.

but there is still hope

a=1; b=5; c=xxx
for i in $( seq -f "%04g" $a $b )
do
echo mv my_porn${i}.tiff $c
done

result:

mv my_porn0001.tiff xxx
mv my_porn0002.tiff xxx
mv my_porn0003.tiff xxx
mv my_porn0004.tiff xxx
mv my_porn0005.tiff xxx


as you can imagine %04g controls the padding with zeroes to 4 digits

That probably works but it is still a bit ugly and not really optimal.

For your info we are not moving large pron files but building DCP packages for cinema distribution. Each movie is exported to 2k resolution tiff frames before we split them up at certain a certain frame number and move the sequence to their respective reel folder.

I have no problems opening up 6 terminals and write a simple for loop in each to get the job done. The intention was to write a script that anyone in the office could use if needed, typing just the script name, first frame #, last frame # and destination folder and get the job done!

[XerXeX]

but there is still hope

a=1; b=5; c=xxx
for i in $( seq -f "%04g" $a $b )
do
echo mv my_porn${i}.tiff $c
done

Vaphell, thanks for the code. With a little modification we have ourselves a dummy proof version:



#!/bin/bash

for i in $( seq -f "%06g" $1 $2 )
do
mv *${i}* $3
done


Thanks everyone. Love bash!