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Moving Files with Caps using Bash

/ October 3, 2016 — GNU/Linux

We recently ran into an issue where there were legacy all-caps files in a directory, and we needed to move them. The remaining files were all lower-case. It turns out that when there are subdirectories involved, it is not as easy to move just the all-caps files, rather than the subdirectories. Here is an example file structure:

usr-1@srv-1 movefiles $ find .         
.
./listf.sh
./capmv.sh
./Y
./Y/B
./Y/b
./Y/A
./Y/a
./Z
./Z/a
./Z/A
./Z/B
./Z/b
./X
./B
./a
./A
./b
usr-1@srv-1 movefiles $

We have upper and lower case filenames in the current directory, as well as in Y and Z. The X directory is empty. Now, you would think that you could simply look at all of the files in the current directory and move the ones with the first character being a cap. For instance, let’s list all of the files that are specified as [A-Z]*:

usr-1@srv-1 movefiles $ ls [A-Z]*
A  B
X:
Y:
A  B  a  b
Z:
A  B  a  b
usr-1@srv-1 movefiles $

Hmmm… if we were to move these with mv, we would get the subdirectories. Let’s put this in a bash script so we can operate on the files individually. A script like this should work (using mv instead of ls):

usr-1@srv-1 movefiles $ cat listf.sh
for i in [A-Z]*; do
ls -R $i 
done
usr-1@srv-1 movefiles $

The -R lists the directories as it encounters them. This doesn’t work, though:

usr-1@srv-1 movefiles $ sh listf.s
A
B
X:
Y:
A  B  a  b
Z:
A  B  a  b
usr-1@srv-1 movefiles $

What we want are just the files, not the directories. We can add an additional test. The -f test is true if the file exists and is a regular file. Here is a script that works to move all files with the first letter being a cap to the X subdirectory:

usr-1@srv-1 movefiles $ cat capmv.sh
for i in [A-Z]*; do
if [ -f $i ]; then
mv $i X
fi
done
usr-1@srv-1 movefiles $ 
usr-1@srv-1 movefiles $ sh capmv.sh
usr-1@srv-1 movefiles $ find .    
.
./listf.sh
./capmv.sh
./Y
./Y/B
./Y/b
./Y/A
./Y/a
./Z
./Z/a
./Z/A
./Z/B
./Z/b
./X
./X/A
./X/B
./a
./b
usr-1@srv-1 movefiles $

Note that A and B are now in the X directory. The space before the -f in the brackets is required.

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