Creating the needed directories is no problem. They can easily be created on the fly as needed.

But... I still don't think I understand what you're trying to do.

The line you showed us above contains 20 hyphens, not 18. There are 18 hyphens before the 1st comma on that line. There are 19 hyphens between the [ and ] on that line. There are 20 hyphens on that line. You said you wanted to move files to a directory based on the number of hyphens on that line. Is there is different rule that describes which directory should get a file? Or, did you just miscount the hyphens on that line in your description above?

And please explain what: means. What does "the files have IPA alphabets" mean? I asked if your filenames contain any of the characters in the list $, ", ', and the <newline> character. I didn't ask if those characters appear in the file contents; I asked if they appear in any of your files' filenames. And, what is an "IPA alphabet"?

If your filenames contain <newline> characters, I need to completely rethink what I was planning to do. If your filenames contain <dollar-sign> characters or <double-quote> characters, I can use <single-quote> characters to delimit filenames passed to rm. If your filenames contain <single-quote> characters as well, you can use <single-quote>s to quote everything except <single-quote>s and use <double-quote>s to quote <single-quote>s. But, this is sounding more and more like a job than something that is fun to do as a forum volunteer.

For people reading this who don't understand why find -print0 and xargs -0 can't be used to solve this problem, those options do not exist in those utilities on OS X. And, even if it did:

Code:

xargs -I"{}" mv "{}" target_dir

only processes one file at a time and executing mv 690,000 times is going to take forever. And, mv on OS X doesn't have a -t target_directory option. And, even with the relatively large ARG_MAX limit of 262144 on OS X, it won't be possible to move all of the files for a single directory in a single mv command. So, this project requires implementing a simplified command-line argument aggregator (i.e., with a superset of a subset of xargs capabilities) that can construct mv command lines with multiple file operands followed by a fixed directory operand that xargs can't create. (This could be handled by a simple helper shell script, but only if the filenames do NOT contain any <newline> characters.)