Bash - Recursively move all files in folders with given name to their parent directory

Question

I have a document library where all of my files are in folders based on category name but then they are also all in subfolders called 'pdf' as well. Is there a way in bash to scan through all of the directories in the library and move all files in folders named pdf to their parent directory?

Answer 1

The following moves every file from a pdf folder into the parent directory.

find ~/some/folder -type d -name 'pdf' -print0 | while IFS= read -d '' dir
do
  find "$dir" -type f -maxdepth 1 -exec echo mv -- {} "$dir"/.. \;
done

Remove the echo once you're sure it does what you need.

Note that this will overwrite files without asking when the parent already contains one with the same name. Use mv -i to have it prompt you for confirmation before overwriting anything.

Answer 2

Here is what I thought of. Its not the prettiest thing, but it works to your specifications:

find . -ipath "*pdf/*.pdf" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -I{} sh -c 'mv "{}" "$(dirname "{}")"/..'

It moves only .pdf files in pdf subfolders into their corresponding parent directories. To change the command to move all files in pdf subfolders, adjust the ipath argument to *pdf/*.

---

Example usage

$ find .
.
./category1
./category1/other_dir
./category1/other_dir/c1o1.txt
./category1/pdf
./category1/pdf/c1p1.pdf
./category1/pdf/c1p2.pdf
./category1/pdf/c1p3.pdf
./category2
./category2/other_dir
./category2/other_dir/c2o1.txt
./category2/pdf
./category2/pdf/c2p1.pdf
./category2/pdf/c2p2.pdf
./category2/pdf/c2p3.pdf

$ find . -ipath "*pdf/*.pdf" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -I{} sh -c 'mv "{}" "$(dirname "{}")"/..'
.
./category1
./category1/c1p1.pdf
./category1/c1p2.pdf
./category1/c1p3.pdf
./category1/other_dir
./category1/other_dir/c1o1.txt
./category1/pdf
./category2
./category2/c2p1.pdf
./category2/c2p2.pdf
./category2/c2p3.pdf
./category2/other_dir
./category2/other_dir/c2o1.txt
./category2/pdf