Shell Programming and Scripting

Thanks quirkasaurus!

It appears the original script worked the 1st time, but when I ran it again it created another subdirectory below the previous one. I tried running several times before I looked at the output and now I have a huge mess ...

/images/main/a/a/a/a/a/A101.jpg
/images/main/b/b/b/b/B201.jpg

Depending on where I killed the program there are a varying number of sub-directories.

How can I get back to everything in the /images/main directory and start all over again with an alternative suggestion?

Thanks for your patience on this thread and your help is greatly appreciated.

First, put everything back to normal:

mkdir /tmp/my_images

find images/main -name \*.jpg -exec /bin/cp {} /tmp/my_images \; -print

Verify that all the images are there:

ls /tmp/my_images

Nuke everything in images/main:

cd images/main

\rm -rf *

Put all the images back:

cp /tmp/my_images/* .

Now.

Don't use the solutions that used the find command.
Instead, use mine, posted earlier. This one will avoid
any recursive directory building problem.

HTH

HTH - Thank you! OK - Recovered!

I am now using your script. How do I modify to handle "Arguement List Too Long" error because I have 30,000 images in the directory?

typeset -u -L1 first_letter

/bin/ls |
grep '.jpg$' |
while read file ; do

first_letter=$file

mkdir $first_letter
/bin/mv $file $first_letter

done

With much help from quirkasaurus this problem was resolved using BASH script below:

Code:

#!/bin/sh

cd "$1"

/bin/ls |
grep '.jpg$' |
while read file ; do
  first_letter=`echo $file | cut -c 1 | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
  mkdir -p $first_letter
  /bin/mv $file $first_letter
done