Shell Programming and Scripting

I do not think fear of change is closely related to age.

People are inherently afraid of changes.
Changes like jobs, partners, living space etc.
The IT is no different.

Problem nowadays is that a good programmer / engineer can cause a lot of former jobs redundant.

And in this wild capitalism company will not see those people as an asset, but as a money drain.
They will not re qualify / re educate those people to do something else.

Best example are self driving trucks and cars.
In about 5 to 10 years, self driving trucks will be common.
What will all those truckers do then ?
Most of them will not adapt and become a social burden.

Progress ? Yes!
But not all variables have been included or discussed at higher levels.
Not all people are meant to code or build machines.
I'm sure automation and robotics experts didn't have more poverty in mind when designing the next big thing.

Sorry for the philosophical rant!

Regards
Peasant.

I'll try that newer code. I'm sure it'll work great. Thanks again.

I find it funny that I know so little about simple coding like this and a lot of people think I'm some sort of genius. If only I had the knowledge you guys have - I could be even more frustrated! Knowing what can be done and then having to fight with people and their status quo is a mental battle for me. Do I try to convince them or do I leave them alone? I usually do things my way, keep it to myself, and after a while they hear about it and want to see what I've written and how it works, but almost no one is willingly open at first.

---------- Post updated at 09:21 PM ---------- Previous update was at 09:08 PM ----------

Oddly, what you're talking about with automation I agree with somewhat. The self driving cars will need someone to program them, someone to build them, someone to get them when they breakdown ... I've noticed that here in America everyone wants a fantastic job and that's who they are. In other countries people have a job and no matter what it is it's a job and they're proud to have A job at all. Most Americans, it seems, would rather accept free money from the government than work a job they don't think is worthy of their efforts.

I recently watched an episode of Anthony Bordain's Parts Unknown where there were dozens of people who's job it was to slowly turn a spit while a pig cooked. No automation. These people crouched down and slowly turned that handle, hour after hour. They had jobs!

We need to change our culture from, "free money is better than working", to "If you didn't work for your money you're the scum of the earth." Instead of people being embarrassed about a shitty job they should be embarrassed they don't have a job at all.

Or the other way round, you are in the source dir and want to copy to the ../fa/la/ dir

Code:

for c in *.xyz
do
  cp "$c" "../fa/la/.$c"
done

There is nothing basically wrong with your command. See the transscript from my shell:

Code:

-1-2- ~/tmp > mkdir ../tmp/abcd
-0-2- ~/tmp > touch bla
-0-2- ~/tmp > mv ./bla ../tmp/abcd/.bla
-0-2- ~/tmp > ls -l ../tmp/abcd/.bla
-rw-r--r-- 1 fisrona Domain Users 0 Dec  1 08:26 ../tmp/abcd/.bla
-0-2- ~/tmp >

You say doesn't work without any additional information. I take it that you didn't get an error message from mv, otherwise you would have posted it. Now I have never encountered a case where mv would not work and at the same time does not write a message to stderr to explain why it failed.

I suggest that you reproduce the commands which I have posted on your machine and compare the output.

I appreciate that I am coming to this thread very late and you seem to have some very qualified expert help here already. Therefore, I think this is likely to be my only post on this thread. However, I would like to contribute the following notes:

1. You are confusing filename and path. In /a/b/c/xyz, the/a/b/c is the path and xyz is the filename. The leading / means the path starts from the top of the system.

2. Without the leading / the path starts from the directory you are currently in, ie, there is a directory a pre-existing, with a b directory under that pre-existing, and a c directory under that pre-existing.

I don't think you have told us all what OS you are using but it's unlikely that your (failing) 'mv' command is capable of creating the directories 'fa' and 'la' whilst moving the file. I think your destination path MUST pre-exist before you issue your 'mv' command.

I just wanted to make that point. That may, or may not, be your issue.

Wow, you're right. I completely wrote that command backward in the original post. It should have been mv ../fa/la/bla ./.bla

I got great feedback even though I completely screwed up the question.

Thank you everyone for the great info.