Bizarre mv operation

Question

The use of a renaming program severely screwed up some of my files. I'm trying to get them back in order.

I have file structure like this:

./Hello World/some-filename.ext
./Kitty Parade/another.ext
./Third Example/abc.ext
./some-filename.ext2
./another.ext2
./abc.ext2

The goal is the move the files in current folder (./) back to their original folders.

For example:
another.ext2 belongs in the ./Kitty Parade/ folder
some-filename.ext2 belongs in the ./Hello World/ folder
abc.ex2 belongs in the ./Third Example/ folder`

The rule can be described as this: If a file exists in current folder (./), find a folder than contains a file with the same filename (but with different extension) and move it to that folder. Note: there is no reliable relation between ./myFilename and that file's ./originalFolderName.

This happened to over 4,000 files otherwise I'd do it manually. Any possible help?

Answer 1

Try this piece of shell magic:

for i in *.*; do
  BASE=$(basename "$i" .ext2)
  LIST=*/"${BASE}".*
  DIR=$(dirname "${LIST}")
  mv -n "$i" "${DIR}"
done

Or as an oneliner:

for i in *.*; do mv -n "$i" "$(dirname */"$(basename "$i" .ext2)".*)"; done

Before:

whitequark@forth:~/test$ ls *
test 1.ext2  test 2.ext2  test 3.ext2

f 1:
test 1.ext

f 2:
test 2.ext  test 3.ext

After:

whitequark@forth:~/test$ ls *
f 1:
test 1.ext  test 1.ext2

f 2:
test 2.ext  test 2.ext2  test 3.ext  test 3.ext2

The -n switch will protect you from overwriting anything.