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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers using gsed with cp to sort files in directory - every N file copy to new place Post 302563977 by Corona688 on Wednesday 12th of October 2011 02:17:21 PM
Old 10-12-2011
OSX's default sed is an ancient BSD incarnation which doesn't even support things like \n. gsed is a good idea.

I don't know how "2~5p" is supposed to work though, trying it on /etc/passwd I actually get more lines out of it than I put in!

How about
Code:
ls | awk '(NR%3)==0' | while read LINE
do
        echo cp "$LINE" /path/to/dest/
done

One of the simplest ways to use awk is an expression which tells it whether to print the current line or not. NR is the number of records. So it will print the current line only when the line number divided by 3 has a remainder of 0 -- so line 3, 6, 9, 12, ...

Then you feed it into a while loop and move files one by one.

If you wanted to avoid running cp 30,000 times, you could pipe them into xargs/tar:

Code:
ls | awk '(NR%3)==0' | xargs -I {} tar -cf - | tar -C /path/to/dest/ -xf -

running 'tar -cf - file1 file2 file3' bundles files into a tape archive printed directly to standard output. xargs converts file names in a pipeline into arguments fed into tar. Piping that directly into tar -xf extracts the files. -C tells it where. So it pipes the contents of all the files between the two tars and creates them where you want.
 

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WRAP-AND-SORT(1)					      General Commands Manual						  WRAP-AND-SORT(1)

NAME
wrap-and-sort - wrap long lines and sort items in Debian packaging files SYNOPSIS
wrap-and-sort [options] DESCRIPTION
wrap-and-sort wraps the package lists in Debian control files. By default the lists will only split into multiple lines if the entries are longer than 80 characters. wrap-and-sort sorts the package lists in Debian control files and all .install files. Beside that wrap-and-sort removes trailing spaces in these files. This script should be run in the root of a Debian package tree. It searches for control, control.in, copyright, copyright.in, install, and *.install in the debian directory. OPTIONS
-h, --help Show this help message and exit. -a, --wrap-always Wrap all package lists in the Debian control file even if the entries are shorter than 80 characters and could fit in one line line. -s, --short-indent Only indent wrapped lines by one space (default is in-line with the field name). -b, --sort-binary-packages Sort binary package paragraphs by name. -k, --keep-first When sorting binary package paragraphs, leave the first one at the top. Unqualified debhelper(7) configuration files are applied to the first package. -n, --no-cleanup Do not remove trailing whitespaces. -d path, --debian-directory=path Location of the debian directory (default: ./debian). -f file, --file=file Wrap and sort only the specified file. You can specify this parameter multiple times. All supported files will be processed if no files are specified. -v, --verbose Print all files that are touched. AUTHORS
wrap-and-sort and this manpage have been written by Benjamin Drung <bdrung@debian.org>. Both are released under the ISC license. DEBIAN
Debian Utilities WRAP-AND-SORT(1)
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