I have a collection of files at ./date-and-time/fixed/path/filename where date-and-time and filename are variable. I would like to move all these files to ./filename/date-and-time. The former path is the filename and the former filename is the path. Is there a good way to do this? There are ~1000 files in total with ~100 distinct filenames.

Something like this should work (note I have echoed the actual commands; please check carefully that it is doing the right thing before removing them)

#!/bin/bash

shopt -s nullglob

for file in */fixed/path/*; do 
 [[ -f "$file" ]] || continue
 f="$file##*/"; d="$file%%/*"
 echo mkdir -p "$f" && echo mv --no-clobber -- "$file" "$f/$d"
done

I'll assume the pattern for the path is always ./date-and-time/fixed/path/filename with variable date-and-time and filename.

date-and-time can be extracted via awk:

$ echo './date-and-time/fixed/path/filename' |awk -F "/" 'print $2'
date-and-time

filename is a bit easier to get as it can be extracted by basename:

$ basename ./date-and-time/fixed/path/filename
filename

From these two code segments, an untested script follows for moving the files in the way you describe when executed in .. Please verify it before use.

#!/bin/bash

for i in ./*/fixed/path/*; do
 date_and_time=$(echo "$i" |awk -F "/" 'print $2');
 filename=$(basename "$i");
 mkdir "$filename";
 mv "$i" "$filename"/"$date_and_time";
done;

Like this :

mkdir ./filename/ && mv ./date-and-time/path/to/path-to-your-folder/* ./filename/date-and-time

Edit:

If you need to create more folders i recommend making a script something like this :

Before you start, I really recommend you make a backup of the folder you are trying to do this on.

cd into the folder you trying to operate on and then:

for file in *; do
 if [[ -f "$file" ]]; then
 mkdir "$file%.*"
 mv "$file" "$file%.*"
 fi
done

1. Loop over all (*) the files in the current folder.


2. create a folder (mkdir) from the file without its extension $file%.*


3. move (mv) the file into that folder.