how to move a file after identifying it with ls | egrep , or "egrep" vs "find"

Question

I need to move all images with a specific filename string to a specific directory.

This is an example filename

facility_92+SOURCE1+SOURCE1.0

After the 'facility_' there can be 1 to 5 digits.

The following will return a list of the files I wish to move:

ls | egrep "facility_([0-9]*)\+SOURCE[0-9]*"

However I get stuck when trying to move anything this returns. I have tried to use find to move matching files to the moved folder:

for f in 'find ./ | ls | egrep "facility_([0-9]*)\+SOURCE[0-9]*"'; do mv $f moved/; done

But am get a number of errors where mv parses the conditions as a string ...

I had another go with '-exec':

find ./ | ls | egrep "facility_([0-9]*)\+SOURCE[0-9]*" -exec mv moved 

But receive similar errors ...

Advice appreciated. Am I wrong to try this approach at all? Should i just figure out how to do the same regex in 'find'?

Answer 1

With find you should not concatenate commands through piping.

It has a nice -regex flag to which you can pass your filename matching string:

find . -regextype egrep -regex ".*facility_([0-9]*)\+SOURCE[0-9]*.*" -exec mv {} DIRECTORY \;

The final \; passes each one of the matching filenames to mv in place of the {}.

As you can see, you need to use .* at the beginning and at the end of the regular expression because find needs to mach on the whole path:

-regex pattern
       File name matches regular expression pattern.  This is a match on the whole path, not a search. For  example, to  match  a  file named './fubar3', you can use the regular expression '.*bar.' or '.*b.*3', but not 'f.*r3'.