I have 10000 files in a directory. The name is something like:

1.dat
2.dat
3.dat
4.dat
.....
.....
.....
1000.dat.
----
-----

Files are not sorted. I want to move first 500 largerst files from this directory to another directory. Next 500 largest files to another directory.

what would be the simple korn shell script for this problem?

thanks

Here's one way. Take out the prints when you have finished testing. The tail +2 is to skip the total blocks displayed by ls -l. This will not work if any of the filenames contain spaces.

i=0
split=1000
ls -l | tail +2 | sort -rn -k 5,5 | awk '{print $NF}' | while read f
do
        (( i%${split}==0 )) && print mkdir subdir$(( i/${split} ))
        print mv $f subdir$(( i/${split} ))
        (( i=i+1 ))
done

First you would need your file list sorted by file size
#!/bin/ksh
SearchPath=/whereever0
LowerSizeFilePath=/whereever1
UpperSizeFilePath=/whereever2
#
cd $SearchPath
ls -e | egrep -v "/$|->" | cut -c31-41,63- | sort -n -k 1n,10 | cut -c12- > /tmp/filelist~
#^ ^ ^ ^ ^
#| | | | + get file
#| | | +-- Sort file list by file size
#| | +-- Get only file size and file name
#| +-- Get off the list soft links and directories entries
#+-- list extended $CWD
#
#You can send the list to a temp file with "> /tmp/filelist~"
#
#You need to know the number of file with
FileCount=`cat /tmp/filelist~ | wc -l`
HeadSize=`expr $FileCount / 2`
TailSize=`expr $FileCount - $HeadSize`
#
mv `head -$HeadSize /tmp/filelist~` $LowerSizeFilePath
mv `tail -$TailSize /tmp/filelist~` $UpperSizeFilePath
rm /tmp/filelist~

Hi

thanks for the solution. But for some reason it is not working or may be I am not understanding.

Can you please give more detail :

Why are you using egrep? What is it really doing?
ls it a typo that you are using ls -e instead of ls -l?

thanks for your help.

Bhanu72:
I when to my server and tryed the script and it did worked. But when ran into a diffrent server "ls -e" is not supported. I look into diffrence on SunOS and notice that the server not supporting "-e" option for "ls" is has lower patche level for SunOS 5.10. So I can only assure that this script may work on Sun Solaris 5.10 Generic_125100-10.

I changed the script to use "ls -l", but need to change the "cut" setting.

ls -l | egrep -v "/$|->" | cut -c31-41,55- | sort -n -k 1n,10 | cut 
-c13- > /tmp/filelist~

Did you try my solution? Change split=1000 to split=500 by the way, I forgot that you originally wanted to move 500 files, not 1000.

Hi,

I did try it with small file number. split=5. It worked fine. In your code, you have created the directory within the script. But in my case the directory already exist. So I have to make simple modification.

Thanks for your help. I appreciate it.

Bhanu72