The IFS variable is used by the shell when splitting fields. Each character in the value of the string assigned to IFS will be used as a field delimiter (although there are some special cases for strings of adjacent characters in the space character class when characters in that class are field separators). The value I used happens to work for the filenames in your example, but it should have just been:

Code:

IFS='_-'

or:

Code:

IFS=_-

to have the shell split fields on just <underscore> and <hyphen> characters. The value I used in the script would also split fields on open and close square brackets. When IFS is unset, the shell behaves as if IFS had been set to a string containing the three characters <space>, <tab>, and <new-line>.

The command:

Code:

set -- $file

first clears all positional parameters and then sets the positional parameters for the current shell execution environment to the values obtained by performing field splitting on the expansion of the file variable. When $file expands to the string:

Code:

010020001_S-ABC-Sort-DEFAW_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.txt

that sets the positional parameters as follows:

Code:

$1 010020001
$2 S
$3 ABC
$4 Sort
$5 DEFAW
$6 YYYYMMDD
$7 HHMMSS.txt

and sets the special parameter # to the number of positional parameters (i.e., $# expands to 7).

In post #1 in this thread you said that all of the filenames you would be processing started with 010020, and I wrote the filename matching pattern used to identify the files to be processed by the for loop in the script I gave you to match that statement. If those 1st six characters aren't always 010020, how do we know what name is supposed to be used for the directory into which files are to be moved?

Are you now saying that files to be processed have names starting with 010020 or 111020, or can there be any string of six digits there? Or, any string of six characters? Or, any string of an arbitrary number of characters?

Making lots of unwarranted assumptions, maybe the following will come closer to what you want:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
for file in ??????[0-9][0-9][0-9][_-]S[_-]*[_-]*[_-]*[_-]*[_-]*.txt
do	IFS=_-
	set -- $file
	unset IFS
	destination=/tmp/010020${1#??????}_$2-$3-$4-$5
	mkdir -p "$destination"
	mv "$file" "$destination/$file"
done