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I want to move all my FLAC music folders to a new folder called lossless. Currently the FLAC folders are inside a folder with lossy formats such as MP3 and AAC.
I want to filter the folders with "flac" in their name and move them to a new directory.
How can I achieve this?
You can use:
mv *flac* directory_name
The *flac* is a file expansion (not regex, thanks Sparhawk for the correction) for file names containing the word 'flac' within any number of characters so it would capture:
If you just want files ending in .flac use
mv *.flac directory_name
Try,
find /path/to/flac -type d -iname '*flac*' -exec mv -t /path/to/newDirectory {} +
find is that you'll remove folders from the search paths that find may expect to be able to enter. In the example in your code, the first folder that would have been moved is /path/to/flac (since it matches the criteria). You would then get lots of "file not found" errors. To mitigate this, use -mindepth 1 (to avoid the top folder) and -depth (to do a depth-first traversal of the hierarchy).
-mindepth 1 and -depth, you also do not check whether a folder with the same name exists at the destination. The two folders /path/to/flac/A/flacdir and /path/to/flac/B/flacdir would collide.
Assuming we're dealing with a single top-level directory where these folders are to be found:
mv -i somefolder/*flac*/ path/to/lossless
This would move all folders that has the string flac in their names ot the indicated target folder, while alerting you when trying to overwrite anything already existing on in the target directory.
By adding / at the end of the filename pattern, we only match directories. This way we will not move any regular files that would have matched the pattern without the trailing /.
mv *flac* /path/to/lossless?*flac*/, to match directories.