UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,
Quick question: My directory has folders such as 001, 002, ... till 99999.

I would like to move all three digit folders into one folder, say /three, all four digit folder into /four, and five digit folders into /five. What is the easiest way to use mv to achieve this?

mv 00% /three does not work. (what should be the regex syntax to replace one character alone)?

I use Ubuntu 10.10 64bit. Thanks in advance!

simple shell interpretation use the question mark :

Code:

# ls ??
f1  f2  in  ml
# ls ???
com  ref  tab  ts1  ts2  tst
# ls ????
atst  mtst  tst2

Okay, square brackets match a character class eh... so this works:

Code:

mv -iv [0-9][0-9][0-9] /three
mv -iv [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9] /four
mv -iv [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9] /five

---------- Post updated at 01:41 PM ---------- Previous update was at 01:36 PM ----------

Thanks ctsgnb.

Code:

mv -iv ??? /three

All by one line command, it will automatical generate the folder (name as 1,2,3...)

If the awk command is successful, then run the command with red part.

Code:

ls -l |awk '/^d/ {s="/abc/xyz/" length($NF);print "mkdir", s, "; mv",$NF,s}' |sh