How to Move file using Script

Question

I have been asked to design a script which when executed, moves the file types given in the arguments to the respective folder(creates the folder with file type if not there).

Like suppose I give command ./M6.sh mp3 txt

This should move all mp3 files in the current working directory into a folder named "mp3" and copy all mp3 files into that and also moves all the text files from current working directory to folder named txt.

I wrote the below code, but I am facing trouble with mv command.

Please help.

Answer 1

Your code is needlessly complicated. I believe that the issue is that you fail to call mv if the destination directory doesn't already exist. You also seem to try to move thing to a directory in the root directory.

Consider

#!/bin/sh

for suffix do
    mkdir -p -- "$suffix" || exit 1
    mv -- *."$suffix" "$suffix"
done

or,

#!/bin/bash

suffixes=( "$@" )

for suffix in "${suffixes[@]}"; do
    mkdir -p -- "$suffix" || exit 1
    mv -- *."$suffix" "$suffix"
done

(Change the exit 1 to continue if you want to skip forward to the next given suffix when a directory can't be created, rather than to terminate the script).

This would loop over all filename suffixes (not really file types as a file type in Unix are things like "regular file", "directory", "symbolic link" etc.), would create a subdirectory in the current directory named after that suffix, and then move all files with names ending in ."$suffix" to that directory.

The command mkdir -p dirname would not fail if the directory dirname already exists.

Example run:

$ tree
.
|-- file1.mp3
|-- file1.png
|-- file1.txt
|-- file2.mp3
|-- file2.png
|-- file2.txt
|-- file3.mp3
|-- file3.png
|-- file3.txt
|-- file4.mp3
|-- file4.png
|-- file4.txt
|-- file5.mp3
|-- file5.png
|-- file5.txt
`-- script.sh

0 directory, 16 files

$ ./script.sh txt mp3

$ tree
.
|-- file1.png
|-- file2.png
|-- file3.png
|-- file4.png
|-- file5.png
|-- mp3
|   |-- file1.mp3
|   |-- file2.mp3
|   |-- file3.mp3
|   |-- file4.mp3
|   `-- file5.mp3
|-- script.sh
`-- txt
    |-- file1.txt
    |-- file2.txt
    |-- file3.txt
    |-- file4.txt
    `-- file5.txt

2 directories, 16 files

Answer 2

When you are using mv commdand you are actually trying to move it to a folder from the root directory. Your command should be from the current directory.

mv *.${myarray[$index]} ./${myarray[$index]}/

Notice the . before directory, it tells you to look for the folder in current directory otherwise you can simply write :

mv *.${myarray[$index]} ${myarray[$index]}/

Above command will also look for the folder in the current directory.