Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I need a little help with this one; Let's say I have two directories

/dir1/dir2/dir3old and /dir1/dir2/dir3new

Within dir3old and dir3new are many folders, each containing some files. How can I search all the sub folders in dir3old for files of a specific date and move the files to the corresponding folders in dir3new?

Doing this portably is more difficult than it sounds.. though anything is possible.

The "find" command excels at finding files that are newer than a target time. So, if the goal is finding files within a tree that are newer than a specified time, that can be done with "find". If this isn't Linux or a platform with GNU find, then the -newer argument of find can be used with a file argument where that file's mtime is used as the target time mentioned above. You can use the touch command to create the file with the timestamp for which you want "find" to find files newer than.

I realize that tons of people are using Linux now or have a good "find" (e.g. GNU find), but I like to show people the "portable" way.

Consider:

touch -t 201007230000 reftime.stamp

(you'll have to do a "man" on "touch" to see if your accepts a -t option or expects the time string, possibly in a different format, simply as an argument)

Then you could do:

find /dir1/dir2/dir3old -type f -newer /fullpathto/reftime.stamp

To get a list of the files that are newer than the time stamp.

Now it would be easy to do a copy at this point using something like cpio to copy the files over... but that isn't what you asked for. You want them to move.. and I don't blame you... just an inode remove/add to a directory entry (very fast).

So you want something like:

mv /dir/dir2/dir3old/p1/p2/p3/file1 /dir1/dir2/dir3new/p1/p2/p3/file1

As long as the destination file1 doesn't exist, which you make it sound like it does not, and the directories already exist on the destination side, then we can filter our list of files into the corresponding "mv" commands to feed to the shell.

Note: the following makes an assumption that the filenames do not contain special characters, but spaces are allowed for.

(this is a one liner)

find /dir1/dir2/dir3old -type f -newer /fullpathto/reftime.stamp |
sed 's,^/dir1/dir2/dir3old/\(.*\),mv "/dir1/dir2/dir3old/\1" "/dir1/dir2/dir3new/\1",'

The nice thing about using a filter like the above is we can run and and safely see the output and see if it makes sense before piping that to a shell.

As I said, it makes assumptions based on what you said... not sure if it's true though. Also, sometimes it helps to know EXACTLY what you are wanting to do this for and on what OS... then it's VERY likely that a more elegant and correct solution can be presented.