[FIXED] How to move all contents of one directory to new directory using wildcard?

Issue

I just updated my file structure for my website and trying to find a fast way to move all files into the new setup. The old set up was:

/CO/001/2022/02-18
/CO/002/2022/02-18
...
/CO/999/2022/02-18

Currently all my images are in that last 02-18 folder. I just updated things so that the new directory listing is:

/CO/001/2022-02-18
/CO/002/2022-02-18
...
/CO/999/2022-02-18

The problem is, I want to move everything I had in the old file structure folders (CO//2022/02-18) into the new folders (CO//2022-02-18) without having to manually go through all 999 old folders and dump the content into the new folders.

I tried the following command already:

mv */2022/02-19 */2022-02-19

But that doesn't seem to be working how intended and gave me a "will not overwrite just-created" error and was trying to put files into the wrong folder (images in 001/2022/02-18 were trying to be put into 002/2022-02-18 instead of 001/2022-02-18)

Solution

We cannot make use of the wild card expansion because

mv */2022/02-18 */2022-02-18

will be expanded as:

mv 001/2022/02-18 002/2022/02-18 ... 999/2022/02-18 "*/2022-02-18"

which will not work as you might expect. Would you please try instead:

#!/bin/bash

for d in /CO/*/2022/02-18/; do          # loop over the old directories
    if [[ -d $d ]]; then                # make sure $d is a dirname
        new=$(sed -E 's#([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}/)$#\1-\2#' <<< "$d")
                                        # modify "*/2022/02-18/" to "*/2022-02-18/"
        echo mv -- "$d" "$new"          # rename the dirname
        old=${d%/}; old=${old%/*}       # extract the parent directory name "*/2022"
        echo rmdir -- "$old"            # remove the empty parent directory
    fi
done

It just prints the commands which will be executed as a dry run. If the result looks good, drop echo before mv and rmdir then run again. (Please note the dry run will output thousands of lines. You do not have to check all the lines. Just looking over a few lines will be good enough.)

Answered By - tshiono

Answer Checked By - Marie Seifert (PHPFixing Admin)