Moving directories into subdirectories based on first character

Question

I would like to move directories into another location and into subdirectories by first letter. For example: ./alpha would move to /otherdir/a/ ./beta would move to /otherdir/b/ All the subdirectories are created and it's a fixed set, so I don't need to worry about checking or creating those. I was hoping to use the output from find . -type d -name "[a-z*]" , and when I run find . -type d -name "[a-z*]" | xargs mv -t /dest/, all the directories get moved, but of course not into subdirectories. I can't figure out if it's possible to use a second argument for the /dest/first character here/ component, passing the first character of each directory name. Is there a way to do this, or a different way to a) generate the directory list and b) pass the directory names and first characters to a move command?

Answer 1

There is no reason for using find (unless the number of directories is huge).

dest_root='/otherdir'
for dir in [a-z]*; do
    [ -d "${dir}" ] && mv "${dir}" "${dest_root}/${dir:0:1}"
done

Answer 2

You need to pick up the first letter of the directory. It is easy to do that by running the output of find through a loop. For example,

for i in $(find . -type d -name "[a-z]*")
do
    echo ${i:2:1}
done

This command gives you the first letter of each directory, ignoring the leading ./. To move it into a destination, you will have to put the directory elsewhere (above the current directory) to avoid recursive moves. Let us say that your destination directories are in ../dest/a, ../dest/b, and so on. You can replace the echo command with mv and the above loop can become

destination="../dest"
for i in $(find . -type d -name "[a-z]*")
do
    mv ${i} ${destination}/${i:2:1}
done

You'll have to adjust for destination.