Re: Learning Bash Questions: the MV command

On Tuesday 28 February 2006 21:18, Dotan Cohen wrote:
On 2/28/06, Paul Howarth <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 2006-02-28 at 22:01 +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote:
On 2/28/06, Paul Howarth <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 2006-02-28 at 09:26 +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote:
I am trying to learn as I go with bash on a FC4 install. I need to
do two things that are confounding me:

1) I need to move all the photos from a huge, complex tree to one
big directory. Easy:
$ find . -name "*.jpg" -exec mv '{}' /home/dotancohen/big_directory
\; However, there are a few photos that have duplicate file names
in different directories. In this case, it overwrites. That is bad!
I tried adding the -i flag to prompt me, but it takes the next 'mv'
as a response to the prompt, and the next 'mv' fails. Is there a
way to have it not fail the next mv, yet not overwrite? Or better
yet, in the case of duplicate file names, to append something to
the end of the file name, so that it will not be duplicate? Of
course, if _that_ file name is taken, it should append something
else, etc. Is this too complex for Bash?

find . -name "*.jpg" -exec mv --backup=numbered \
'{}' /home/dotancohen/big_directory \;

2) I will then be left with a huge tree with mostly empty
directories. I need to remove the empty directories, but leave
those in place that do contain files. Is there a way to check if a
directory is populated before 'rm'ing it? If the directory contains
another directory that _is_ empty, then of course they should both
be deleted. Er, is this possible?

find . -depth -mindepth 1 -type d \
-exec rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty '{}' \;

Paul.

Thanks, Paul. Although "man mv" describes ---backup=numbered as doing
what I had described, in this case it overwrites! I just tried it with
the code that you provided (in case I was doing something syntaxly
wrong), however, it did overwrite!

For some reason, instead of giving numbered backups, it overwrites. Is
this a bug?

There's certainly something strange going on there, as it certainly
worked for me when I tested it before posting.

As useful way of trying to debug find commands is to put "echo " in
front of the command you're trying to run, e.g.

find . -name "*.jpg" -exec echo mv --backup=numbered \
'{}' /home/dotancohen/big_directory \;

and that should list of commands that you could try one at a time to see
what's going on.

Paul.

Thank you Paul. I appreciate your time in writing and testing the
code. That is real dedication!

I will play with the echo command that you suggest. Some googleing led
me to beleive that I would be better off trying to learn perl than
bash, if moving and parsing files is what I expect to be doing mostly.
I'm no syadmin, just a home user.

Thank you.

Dotan Cohen

Dotan

I haven't tried to test this, as Paul did, (I'm on a production machine, so I
don't experiment here) but I wonder if you've got the no-clobber setting OFF.

Its ages since I worked with bash, but if I remember correctly, if you switch
off the no-clobber flag, then mv doesn't bother with backups, it just
over-writes.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong please!

TD

--
Tony

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