Move files back by 2 directory

Question

$ cat file
/tmp/foldera/folderb/folderc/file1
/tmp/folderc/folderd/foldere/file2
/tmp/folderf/folderg/folderh/file3

Need to move this files to

/tmp/foldera/
/tmp/folderc/
/tmp/folderf/

respectively using a loop or any easy handy way to do that.

Answer 1

Use a while loop:

while IFS= read -r l; do
  mv -v -- "$l" "${l%/*/*/*}/"
done <file

• while IFS= read -r l will read the file line by line.
• mv -v move the files and -v tells mv to be verbose
  • "$l" is the source filename
  • "${l%/*/*/*}/" is the target directory. It removes 3 slashes and what is between them (/*/*/*) from the back end of the filename.

---

This will produce:

»/tmp/foldera/folderb/folderc/file1“ -> »/tmp/foldera/file1“
»/tmp/folderc/folderd/foldere/file2“ -> »/tmp/folderc/file2“
»/tmp/folderf/folderg/folderh/file3“ -> »/tmp/folderf/file3“

Answer 2

I'll suggest a similar answer as chaos, but using dirname

while IFS= read -r l; do
    mv -- "$l" "$(dirname -- "$(dirname -- "$l")")"
done <file

dirname reports the path of the directory a file/directory is located in. This has the advantage of being able to handle moving a directory as well, in case your file has an entry like:

/tmp/foldera/folderb/folderc/folderd/