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If you have a text file with lines

abc
123
def
hij

And you have a directory of files called

abc.txt
tgr.txt
lot.txt
hij.txt

And you want to get the files in the directory that match a line in the text file and move those files in that directory to a sub-directory, what is the best way to do this in bash? The sub-directory, in this example, would have the files:

abc.txt
hij.txt

What I'm thinking is to do something that says: if that string* exists (with a wildcard) in the directory as a filename, move that file to a subdirectory.

I understand that I could potentially use a combination of the find or the grep commands, but I'm honestly stuck as to where to proceed from there. Thanks.

geeb.24
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1 Answers1

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cat text.txt | while read line; 
do 
    find . -maxdepth 1 -name "$line*" -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} mv {} ./target
done

Pipe your text file into a loop and search for each line in the current directory. If you find something pipe into xargs (if you find multiple files) and move each file into your target directory.

Alberti Buonarroti
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