Shell Programming and Scripting

@ guptam,

If a directory named dir3 is already exists, then xargs will move that 26 files to that directory ..

If dir3 not exists, then shell will treat that has a file instead of directory and keep on over-writing the contents from a.txt then b.txt then c.txt and finally ends up with the z.txt content ..

Use if condition before processing that line ..

Code:

[ -d /dir1/dir2/dir3 ] && ls -lrt | awk '$7==12{print $9}' | xargs -i mv {} /dir1/dir2/dir3 || echo "dir3 not exists"

Hope it clears

This is interesting. The first command fails if the directory /dir1/dir2/dir3 does not exist. The second command creates a file under /dir1/dir2 called dir3 if /dir1/dir2 exists but /dir1/dir2/dir3 is not a directory.