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Accepted
user289455
Asked: 2020-03-22 05:23:44 +0800 CST

Moving files into sorted folder based on the filename

  • 772

So I have this folder of movies that looks like

Current
  movie1 (1962).mkv
  movie 2b (1993)
    movie 2b (1993) cd1.mp4
    movie 2b (1993) cd1.srt
  movie 3 (2019).avi
  movie 1942 (2012).mkv

And I would like to move them into another folder that contains the folder structure by year with the right movies in each folder. If there is a sub-folder like with movie 2b I don't mind of that folder is stripped or kept - whatever is easier as long as it goes into the right year. The source and destination are in the same partition so I would rather use mv than rsync.

Sorted
  1962
  1993
  2012
  2019

I got this far based on another question/answers in the forum but I know it's wrong because I don't know how to strip the brackets from the year and I don't know how to specify a source and destination folder.

for f in *.*; do
        if [ -f "$f" ] # does file exist?
        then
                dir=$(echo "$f" | grep -o "([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])" | head -1) 
                if [ "$dir" ] # check if string found
                then
                        mkdir -p "$dir"  # create dir
                        mv "$f" "$dir"     # move file into new dir
                else
                        echo "INCORRECT FILE FORMAT: \""$f"\"" # print error if file format is unexpected
                fi
        fi
done

Any suggestions?

scripts command-line bash mv

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Using BASH_REMATCH to backreference matched subexpression:

    #!/bin/bash

for i in movies/*; do
    if [[ $i =~ \(([0-9]{4})\) ]]; then
        mkdir -p year/${BASH_REMATCH[1]}
           mv -t year/${BASH_REMATCH[1]} "$i"
    else
        echo "Sort panic!"
    fi
done
    • 1