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Linux/macOS - How t...
 
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Linux/macOS - How to split a directory into multiple directories

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(@hans)
Famed Member Admin
Joined: 10 years ago
Posts: 2556
Topic starter  

The problem I ran into was that I had several thousand of files in one directory, and I wanted them to be divided over multiple subdirectories so my file explorer wouldn't go bonkers (long story).

So basically: one dir has thousands of files -> one dir has several sub dirs with a fixed number of files in it (50 in this example).

For this I wrote a Terminal script, which may be helpful to others:

#!/bin/bash

# dirnumber generates the name of the output directory
dirnumber=1

# base directory
basedir=/path/to/base/dir

# the number of files we have moved
filesmoved=0

# number of files per dir
filesindir=50

# Go through all JPG files in the current directory
for f in *; do

   # Create new output directory if first of new batch of 2000
   if [ $filesmoved -eq 0 ]; then
      outdir=$basedir/$dirnumber
      mkdir $outdir
      ((dirnumber++))
   fi
   
   # Move the file to the new subdirectory
   mv "$f" "$outdir"
   
   # You can try this instead of the "mv" line to do testing
   # echo "$f" "$outdir"

   # Count how many we have moved to there
   ((filesmoved++))

   # Start a new output directory if we have sent "filesindir"
   [ $filesmoved -eq filesindir ] && filesmoved=0
done

   
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