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hirschme
Asked: 2018-04-25 13:54:19 +0800 CST

How can I move all files matching a pattern into a folder?

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ls | grep 'NC022.*nii'

Shows me all the files containing NC022 and nii.

But when I try to move them using

mv NC022.*nii NC022/

It complains that 

mv: cannot stat 'NC022.*nii': No such file or directory

This happens also if I try this (as seen in other answers).

mv -t NC022 'ls | grep 'NC022.*nii''

I am struggling to see what the error is, as I have the feeling of having done exactly the same thing numerous times without errors...

How can I move all files matching a pattern into a folder?

Example of partial ls output for first command:

NC022_Background1_Raw import  W325.39 L290.nii
NC022_Background2_Copy (2) of Raw import  W325.39 L290.nii
NC022_Background3_Raw import  W1103.50 L551.nii
NC022_Mask1_mask_air.nii
command-line

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You are confusing regular expression syntax (as used by grep) with glob patterns (as used by the shell).

    In regex, . means any single character, and * means zero or more repetitions. So grep 'NC022.*nii' matches NC022 to nii with anything (including nothing) in between.

    In contrast, . is literal in shell globs, while * itself means zero or more characters. So NC022.*nii matches NC022. to nii with anything (including nothing) in between.

    In particular, if you are trying to match all files with a .nii extension, the . is in the wrong place: you'd want NC022*.nii i.e.

    mv NC022*.nii NC022/
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  2. In our case, the issue was a little different. There was a space in the path, so we had put the whole path in quotes. Then the same error message mv: cannot stat xxxx': No such file or directory results. The solution was to omit the quotes and mask the spaces:

    Before:

    mv "/code/API Server/Data/*.rdf" /server/data

    Solution:

    mv /code/API\ Server/Data/*.rdf /server/data

    Maybe this will help others who are looking for this issue.

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