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OK, I am stumpped. I need a shell Script that will randomly select a file with the extention of .sct. The using a portion of its file name select the six related .mot files. Then move them all to another folder. I also need a user input for the number of files to randomly select.

So I have a file structure like this:

123-12345-00.sct
123-12345-00.mot
123-12345-01.mot
123-12345-02.mot
123-12345-03.mot
123-12345-04.mot
123-12345-05.mot

123-12346-00.sct
123-12346-00.mot
123-12346-01.mot
123-12346-02.mot
123-12346-03.mot
123-12346-04.mot
123-12346-05.mot

And so on. Need to randomly select the file .sct and move it and its related files to another directory. Hopefully I have explained this good enough.

Thanks for the help. I could do this in VB but this UNIX thing has me stumpped. Right now we do it manualy through thousands of files.

Scott

Bertrand Marron
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Scott
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3 Answers3

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This script moves the 123-12345-*.sct and 123-12345-*.mot files to a directory named 123-12345 and so on.

Note: This does not randomly select a file, but all files within the directory. You can modify this to accept a command line argument for the number of random files. Then you'll need to modify this command ls [0-9]*.sct | grep -oe '[0-9]\{3\}\-[0-9]\{5\}' to use your command line argument which is a count of files and return a random number of prefixes.

Copy the below to a file, say mv_sct_mot.sh within the same directory as your sct and mot files.

#!/bin/bash

for prefix in `ls [0-9]*.sct | grep -oe '[0-9]\{3\}\-[0-9]\{5\}'`; do
  mkdir -p ${prefix};
  mv ${prefix}-*.{mot,sct} ${prefix};
done

To make the file executable modify it's permission like:

chmod +x mv_sct_mot.sh

Run it like:

./mv_sct_mot.sh
Ocaj Nires
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  • Why do you pick the mot files to discard them later on? And also: Where does the random part come in? – Nobody moving away from SE Aug 04 '11 at 09:49
  • Edited for clarity regarding random part. The mot files are not discarded. They are moved to the target directory. – Ocaj Nires Aug 04 '11 at 09:59
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    I meant: The ls selects all .sct and .mot files where it would suffice to select only .sct files. When there are no double .sct files(double meaning like: 123-12345-00.sct and 123-12345-01.sct) you don't even have to sort and uniq this way. – Nobody moving away from SE Aug 04 '11 at 10:01
  • You are right, it is unnecessary to select the mot files. This would avoid duplicate prefixes and we can do away with the sort and uniq entirely. Thank you Nobody :-). Edited answer. – Ocaj Nires Aug 04 '11 at 10:06
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    Thanks so much for the help. I am trying to use it now. I put the code in exactly as it is written and I get "No such Directory" error. I am missing something easy I ma sure. As I may have mentioned this is outside my comfort zone. – Scott Aug 04 '11 at 11:37
  • Scott: I'm guessing this is probably because you do not have write permission for mkdir command to work. Would be more helpful if you can post a pastie of the complete error. – Ocaj Nires Aug 04 '11 at 11:48
  • Ocaj, Unfortunatly I only have internet access on the Windows machine. The error is as i wrote. and I am using the larger code sample. Do both of them need to be combined? Do I need to include anything else? I can make a directory in the Thanks Again-- Scott – Scott Aug 04 '11 at 11:56
  • For debugging purposes, you can run this command from the terminal separately `ls [0-9]*.sct | grep -oe '[0-9]\{3\}\-[0-9]\{5\}'` to see the sct file `prefixes` it grabbed. Then run `mkdir -p prefix` with any one of the `prefixes` the previous command grabbed to create the directory. Run the final command to move the mot and sct files within the directory you created with `mv prefix-*.{mot,sct} prefix`. Don't forget to substitute `prefix` with one of the `prefixes` from the output of first command. This way you can figure out which command is creating problems. – Ocaj Nires Aug 04 '11 at 21:35
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#! /usr/bin/env bash

dir="$1"
count="$2"

[ "$dir" ] && [ $count -gt 0 ] && {

    if [ ! -d "$dir" ]; then echo "$0: $dir: no such directory"; exit; fi;

    RANDOM=$(date +%s)                      #init random seed

    for (( c=0; c < $count; c++ )); do

        files=(*.sct)                       #creates array of sct files
        ct=${#files[@]}                     #computes array length

        if [ $ct -eq 0 ]; then break; fi    #no more .sct file, exiting

        sct=${files[$[($RANDOM % $ct)]]}    #pick random file

        # You might want to change this according to your file names
        # Everything before the last dash `-' (included) will be taken
        # as prefix
        prefix=$(echo $sct | sed 's:\(.*-\).*:\1:')

        mot_files=($prefix*.mot)            #creates array of all matching .mot

        mv $sct $dir                        #moves .sct to $dir
        if [ ${#mot_files[@]} -gt 0 ]; then 
            mv ${mot_files[@]} $dir         #moves each matching .mot to $dir
        fi

    done

} || echo "usage: $0 <dir> <num of files>"

Would do it.

/tmp/r > ls
123-12345-00.mot  123-12345-05.mot  123-12346-04.mot
123-12345-00.sct  123-12346-00.mot  123-12346-05.mot
123-12345-01.mot  123-12346-00.sct  123-12348-00.mot
123-12345-02.mot  123-12346-01.mot  123-12348-00.sct
123-12345-03.mot  123-12346-02.mot  foo
123-12345-04.mot  123-12346-03.mot
/tmp/r > mkdir bar
/tmp/r > ./foo bar 2
/tmp/r > ls
123-12346-00.mot  123-12346-02.mot  123-12346-05.mot
123-12346-00.sct  123-12346-03.mot  bar
123-12346-01.mot  123-12346-04.mot  foo
/tmp/r > ls bar
123-12345-00.mot  123-12345-02.mot  123-12345-05.mot
123-12345-00.sct  123-12345-03.mot  123-12348-00.mot
123-12345-01.mot  123-12345-04.mot  123-12348-00.sct
Bertrand Marron
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0

Here's how I would approach this:

#!/bin/bash
## use the first param as count (1 as default value)
count=${1:-1}
## list all .sct files, random sort and pick the first $count
ls $SRCDIR/*.sct | sort -R | head -n $count | 
    while read file; do
        ## for each file, figure out the prefix and move prefix*
        prefix="${file%-*}-"
        mv -v $prefix* $DESTDIR
    done

EDIT: I initially missed the part where the number of files is a parameter, updated the script now. I skipeed the part where you set SRCDIR and DESTDIR just for clarity.

Costi Ciudatu
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