Can't move 100K jpgs from my root to another folder

Question

I accidentally saved 100K jpgs to my root folder, I'd like to move just the jpgs and not the other files like my applications folder to a new folder on my desktop. I tried:

home$ mv *.png ~/Desktop/images

But it returns:

-bash: /bin/mv: Argument list too long

Any ideas?

See [Move all .jpeg from directory structure into one folder on Mac OS X](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5364579/move-all-jpeg-from-directory-structure-into-one-folder-on-mac-os-x) and add `-maxdepth 1`. — Cyrus, Oct 10 '17 at 17:45

Jens · Answer 1 · 2017-10-10T19:30:52.777

0

This happens because the shell tries to pass all of the parameters to mv. Try

for filename in *.png
do
  mv "$filename" ~/Desktop/images/.
done

edit: png, not jpg .,.,

edited Oct 10 '17 at 19:30

answered Oct 10 '17 at 17:53

Jens

570
3
11

Thank you for this @Jens, nothing happens when I try this – meow-meow-meow Oct 10 '17 at 18:04
My bad .... png, not jpg, updated – Jens Oct 10 '17 at 18:06
Still nothing, I waited 10 minutes, it just does nothing and the folder is still empty – meow-meow-meow Oct 10 '17 at 18:07
Did you Try the version with *.png? PS: you Said you saved jpgs but your error indicates png files – Jens Oct 10 '17 at 18:09
There are both jpgs and pngs in there so it won't make a difference, maybe it's not working because there are so many files? – meow-meow-meow Oct 10 '17 at 18:11
1

`ls *.png` is going to fail for the same reason `mv *.png ...` failed, ignoring the general problem of using the output of `ls` in a script. – chepner Oct 10 '17 at 19:18

Can't move 100K jpgs from my root to another folder

1 Answers1