Folder organization

Question

I have several folders ("amazon", "niger", "rhine",...). Inside each of them I have several subfolders ("gfdl", "hadgem", "ipsl",...). Each subfolders is composed by 5 subfolders (e.g. in "amazon", the subfolder "gfdl" is composed by 5 subfolder 'amazon_gfdl', 'amazon_gfdl1', ..., 'amazon_gfdl5'); and the others subfolders follow the same structure (e.g. in "amazon" subfolder "ipsl" is composed by 5 subfolders 'amazon_ipsl', 'amazon_ipsl1', 'amazon_ipsl2',...until 'amazon_ipsl5'. I have a huge amount of folder following the same frame of organisation. Therefore my question is the following: How can I organise each folder and subfolder in such a way that in each subfolder ("gfdl", "hadgem","ipsl",...), 4 new directories are created ("1", "2", "3", "4"); and then that the folder e.g. "amazon_gfdl" (already present in "gfdl") is copied in each of those new directories and finally that "amazon_gfdl1" is moved to the new directory "1", "amazon_gfdl2" is moved to the new directory "2", and so on! I am currently using the command cp and move within each subfolders but it´s not really efficient and I might need an extra life to end this task like that! Therefor any helps or hint will be greatly appreciated. Thanks you very much!

Answer 1

You can write a tiny script to do that for you, along these lines (adjust as needed, I'm not sure I got the story right):

> cat tst.sh 
#!/bin/bash
for river in amazon niger rhine ; do
    for name in gfdl hadgem ipsl ; do
        for count in 1 2 3 4 ; do
            mkdir ${river}/${name}/${count}
            cp -a ${river}/${name}/${river}_${name} ${river}/${name}/${count}
            mv ${river}/${name}/${river}_${name}${count} ${river}/${name}/${count}
        done
    done
done

Before running it:

> find . | sort
.
./amazon
./amazon/gfdl
./amazon/gfdl/amazon_gfdl
./amazon/gfdl/amazon_gfdl1
./amazon/gfdl/amazon_gfdl2
./amazon/gfdl/amazon_gfdl3
./amazon/gfdl/amazon_gfdl4
./amazon/gfdl/amazon_gfdl5
...

Result:

> chmod u+x tst.sh
> ./tst.sh
> find . | sort
.
./amazon
./amazon/gfdl
./amazon/gfdl/1
./amazon/gfdl/1/amazon_gfdl
./amazon/gfdl/1/amazon_gfdl1
./amazon/gfdl/2
./amazon/gfdl/2/amazon_gfdl
./amazon/gfdl/2/amazon_gfdl2
./amazon/gfdl/3
./amazon/gfdl/3/amazon_gfdl
./amazon/gfdl/3/amazon_gfdl3
./amazon/gfdl/4
./amazon/gfdl/4/amazon_gfdl
./amazon/gfdl/4/amazon_gfdl4
./amazon/gfdl/amazon_gfdl
./amazon/gfdl/amazon_gfdl5
...