Move all files with a certain extension from multiple subdirectories into one directory

Question

I have a bunch of .zip files in several directories:

Fol1/Fol2
Fol3
Fol4/Fol5

How would I do move them all to a common base folder?

Answer 1

Go to the toplevel directory of the tree containing the zip files (cd …), then run

mv **/*.zip /path/to/single/target/directory/

This works out of the box in zsh. If your shell is bash, you'll need to run shopt -s globstar first (you can and should put this command in your ~/.bashrc). If your shell is ksh, you'll need to run set -o globstar first (put it in your ~/.kshrc).

Alternatively, use find, which works everywhere with no special preparation but is more complicated:

find . -name '*.zip' -exec mv {} /path/to/single/target/directory/ \;

If you want to remove empty directories afterwards, in zsh:

rmdir **/*(/^Fod)

In bash or ksh:

rmdir **/*/

and repeat as long as there are empty directories to remove. Alternatively, in any shell

find . -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} \;

Answer 2

If you only want to move the .zip files, you could do something like

mkdir ./zipfiles
find . -name "*.zip" -exec mv "{}" ./zipfiles \;

Answer 3

This one is safe when moving data and error free which supported most of all distro regardless versions. This command will scan subdirectories and then move or copy to your new destination directory.

find . -name *.flac -exec mv '{}' "./flac/" ";"

• Run this command at the main directory that contains sub-directories with the files you wish to move.
• Where you can change *.flac to anything like *.zip in your case. Or *.doc just any extension works.
• and mv is the command to move files, or you can use cp to copy data instead of moving.
• ./flac/ is the destination directory that I want to move all FLAC files to. You can also give it a full path like /home/myid/flac/

Full example. (in this case, there are many subdirectories with music artist name at /home/myid/Music/ and then FLAC files are all over different subdirectories level. Since I don't need artist folders but want to have all FLAC files into one directory at /home/myid/Music/flac/

cd /home/myid/Music
mkdir flac
find . -name *.flac -exec mv '{}' "./flac/" ";"
cd flac
ls

Then it will display all FLAC files.

Answer 4

If you're using bash version 4 or higher or zsh you can also use recursive globbing:

mv **/*.zip /path/to/move/zip/files/to

This will move ONLY the files and not their relative paths, so collisions might occur.

Answer 5

Assuming you have the GNU versions of find and mv, the following will be more efficient than the existing find-based answers:

find . -name '*.zip' -exec mv --target-directory='/path/to/outputdir' '{}' +

Using a + at the end of the find -exec means that a list of files will be passed to the mv command, rather than executing one mv command per file found. However, a limitation of this is that you can only place the '{}' at the end of the command, which necessitates the use of the mv --target-directory option, and as far as I know that's a GNU-ism.

Answer 6

As a bash hack, you could use the power of tar:

(cd origin/;find . -exec file --mime-type "{}" \;|grep "application/zip"|cut -d ':' -f 1|xargs tar cf -)|(cd target/; tar xf -) && rm -fr origin/

This has the advantage that it does not depend on file extensions, since it uses the file command to choose the files to move and it preserves the directory structure, but it doesn't work with paths containing spaces.

The final rm is there just to remove the original files (becouse @InquilineKea tolds that he doesn't care about the original folder in the comment).

Of course this is particularly suitable if the origin/ and target/ folders are on different disks. Otherwise the other solutions proposed are more efficient (even if they rely on naming conventions, instead of file's content).

Answer 7

In addition to Gilles' advice where he suggested

mv **/*.zip /path/to/single/target/directory/

you may get feedback saying

mv: will not overwrite just-created

because there might be duplicate file names being copied to the target directory.

If you add --backup=numbered this will create numbered backup files with duplicate names.

e.g. duplicate-name.zip.~1~