Moving all files from subfolders to main folders with duplicate file names

Question

I've been trying to write a little script to sort image files in my Linux server. I tried multiple solution found all over StackExchange but it never meets my requirements.

Explanation:

photo_folder are filled with images (various extensions). Mostly, images are already in this folder. But sometime, like the example below, images are hidden in one or multiple photo_subfolder and file names are often the same such as 1.jpg, 2.jpg... in each of them.

Basically, I would like to move all image files from photo_subfolder to their photo_folder and all duplicated filenames to be renamed before merging together.

Example:

|parent_folder
|    |photo_folder
|    |    |photo_subfolder1
|    |    |    1.jpg
|    |    |    2.jpg
|    |    |    3.jpg
|    |    |photo_subfolder2
|    |    |    1.jpg
|    |    |    2.jpg
|    |    |    3.jpg
|    |    |photo_subfolder3
|    |    |    1.jpg
|    |    |    2.jpg
|    |    |    3.jpg

Expectation:

|parent_folder
|    |photo_folder
|    |    1_a.jpg
|    |    2_a.jpg
|    |    3_a.jpg
|    |    1_b.jpg
|    |    2_b.jpg
|    |    3_b.jpg
|    |    1_c.jpg
|    |    2_c.jpg
|    |    3_c.jpg

Note that files names are just an example. Could be anything.

Thank you!

Answer 1

You can replace the / of the subdirectories with another character, e.g. _ , and then cp/mv the original file to the parent directory.

I try to recreate an example of your directory tree here - very simple, but I hope it can be adapted to your case. Note that I am using bash.

#!/bin/bash

bd=parent
mkdir ${bd}

for i in $(seq 3); do
  mkdir -p "${bd}/photoset_${i}/subset_${i}"

  for j in $(seq 5); do

    touch "${bd}/photoset_${i}/${j}.jpg"
    touch "${bd}/photoset_${i}/${j}.png"
    touch "${bd}/photoset_${i}/subset_${i}/${j}.jpg"
    touch "${bd}/photoset_${i}/subset_${i}/${j}.gif"

  done
done

Here is the script that will cp the files from the subdirectories to the parent directory. Basically

1. find all the files recursively in the subdirectories and loop on them
2. use sed to replace \ with '_' and store this in a variable new_filepath (I also remove the initial parent_, but this is optional)
3. copy (or move) the old filepath into parent with filename new_filepath

for xtension in jpg png gif; do
  while IFS= read -r -d '' filepath; do

    new_filepath=$(echo "${filepath}" | sed s@/@_@g)
    cp "${filepath}" "${bd}/${new_filepath}"

  done < <(find ${bd} -type f -name "*${xtension}" -print0)
done

ls ${bd}

If you want to remove also the additional parent_ from the new_filepath you can replace the new_filepath above with:

new_filepath=$(echo ${filepath} | sed s@/@_@g | sed s/${bd}_//g)

I assumed that you define all the possible extension in the script. Otherwise to find all the extensions in the directory tree you can use the following snippet from a previous answer

find . -type f -name '*.*' | sed 's|.*\.||' | sort -u