Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi. I am trying to come up with a korn shell script to perform a directory split. My directory is on AIX and its 32GB. The folder contents belong to only three files types: pdf, word, tiff and jpeg. I am trying to come up with a script that would create four sub folders each of about 8GB in size, and then tar each of these sub folders created. any help in automating this procedure using a shell script would be much appreciated.
Thank you.

Do the resulting directories need to contain a specific file type or can they be selected randomly as long as each directory does not exceed 8 GBs?

the resulting directories, can contain the files randomly.

A simple approach would be to create the 4 subdirectories in advance and then set an 8 GB quota for each of them.

If we can assume that the four file types are equally distributed in the source directory then we can filter them out by extension. Something like:

Code:

mkdir PDF JPG TIFF WORD
for file in *.pdf; do mv "$file" PDF 2>/dev/null; done && tar -cf PDF.tar PDF
for file in *.doc; do mv "$file" WORD 2>/dev/null; done  && tar -cf WORD.tar WORD
for file in *.tiff; do mv "$file" TIFF 2>/dev/null; done && tar -cf TIFF.tar TIFF
for file in *.jpeg; do mv "$file" JPEG 2>/dev/null; done && tar -cf JPEG.tar JPEG

The above is not really "random", though.

There's however a much simpler option by using dirsplit which comes bundled with cdrkit:

Code:

dirsplit -m -s 8G -f '/\.jpeg/' -p jpeg_ source_directory/ && tar -cf jpeg_files.tar jpeg_*

Unfortunately dirsplit is a Linux thing but you may be able to compile it under AIX (I have had some success with it in Solaris).

Thank you. Can you give me some instructions on how to compile dirsplit under AIX.

In lieu of the for ... loops above you could also use e.g. mv *.pdf PDF (see man mv).