Commands using mv

You WILL have problems if the files have the same name.

Use cases: consolidate music library and unify photos (especially if your camera separates images by dates).

After running the command and verifying if there was no name issues, you can use

to remove now empty subdirectories.

I constantly need to work on my local computer, thus I need a way to download the codeigniter user guide, this is the wget way I figured.

Renames duplicates from MusicBrainz Picard, so you get the latest copy and not a bunch of duplicates.

I realize there's a few of these out there, but none exactly in this form, which seems the cleanest to me

Change run control links from start "S" to stop "K" (kill) for whatever run levels in curly braces for a service called "myservice". NEWFN variable is for the new filename stored in the in-line shell. Use different list of run levels (rc*.d, rc{1,3,5}.d, etc.) and/or swap S with K in the command to change function of run control links.

This command will replace spaces in filename with underscore, for all file in directory that contain spaces.

mkdir some file and mv some file

For this example, all files in the current directory that end in '.xml.skippy' will have the '.skippy' removed from their names.

Useful for backing up old files, custom logs, etc. via a cronjob.

This command changes all filename and directories within a directory tree to unaccented ones. I had to do this to 'sanitize' some samba-exported trees. The reason it works might seem a little difficult to see at first - it first reverses-sort by pathname length, then it renames only the basename of the path. This way it'll always go in the right order to rename everything.

Some notes:

1. You'll have to have the 'unaccent' command. On Ubuntu, just aptitude install unaccent.

2. In this case, the encoding of the tree was UTF-8 - but you might be using another one, just adjust the command to your encoding.

3. The program might spit a few harmless errors saying the files are the same - not to fear.

Using a GUI file managers you can merge directories (cut and paste). This command roughly does the same (it doesn't ask for confirmation (no problem for me) and it doesn't clean up the empty SRC directories (no problem, trivial).

probably does the same:

Very helpful when you've got complex filenames and needs to change just some small parts of it.

Renaming a file called "i-made-a-small-typo-right-here" to "i-made-a-big-typo-right-here":

You could also copy multiple files, edit, remove, process, etc.

Renames all the jpg files as their timestamps with ".jpg" extension.

Only tested on Linux Ubunty Hardy. Works when file names have spaces. The "-maxdepth 2" limits the find search to the current directory and the next one deeper in this example. This was faster on my system because find was searching every directory before the current directory without the -maxdepth option. Almost as fast as locate when used as above. Must use double quotes around pattern to handle spaces in file names. -print0 is used in combination with xargs -0. Those are zeros not "O"s. For xargs, -I is used to replace the following "{}" with the incoming file-list items from find. Echo just prints to the command line what is happening with mv. mv needs "{}" again so it knows what you are moving from. Then end with the move destination. Some other versions may only require one "{}" in the move command and not after the -I, however this is what worked for me on Ubuntu 8.04. Some like to use -type f in the find command to limit the type.

A common mistake in Bash is to write command-line where there's command a reading a file and whose result is redirected to that file.

It can be easily avoided because of :

1) warnings "-bash: file.txt: cannot overwrite existing file"

2) options (often "-i") that let the command directly modify the file

but I like to have that small function that does the trick by waiting for the first command to end before trying to write into the file.

Lots of things could probably done in a better way, if you know one...

If you frequently need to connect to your ubersecure mainframe from various uberunsafe machines, you have to face difficult decision: (a) type the password everytime during the session (lame), (b) add local public key to mainframes authorized_keys file (unsafe), (c) as above, but remove this key at the end of the session (pain in the a55). So let's say you save The Command to tempauth file in bin directory of your mainframe's account and make it executable. Then, while you're on one of these unsafe ones, do:

and password prompts stop the harassment for 30 minutes and you don't have to care to remove the unsafe key after that.

In my job I often have to deal with moving 100,000 files or more. A mv won't do it because there are too many. This will move everything in the current directory to the target path.