Sort Folders Into Alphabetic Sub-Folders

By @edent · bash HowTo linux tutorial · 1 comment · 300 words · read ~1,024 times.

Scratching my own itch. I have a bunch of directories which I want moved into alphabetic sub-directories. This is handy is you have a bunch of MP3s, books, or other catalogued files.

This bash script moves a top level directory (and all the files and subdirectories under it), to a folder based on the (upper-case) version of the first character of the directory name.

#!/bin/bash
for dir in */ ; do
    start=${dir:0:1}
    mkdir -p ${start^^}
    mv "$dir" ${start^^}
done

Save that as sort.sh, make it executable with chmod +x sort.sh and run with ./sort.sh

It turns this:

.
├── Adella
├── adrianna
├── Barb
├── bebe
├── Carleen
├── catherina

Into:

.
├── A
│   ├── Adella
│   ├── adrianna
├── B
│   ├── Barb
│   └── bebe
├── C
    ├── Carleen
    ├── catherina

How it works

Let's break this down to see what everything does

for dir in */ ; do
This loops through the current directory and finds every item which ends with a / - that is, all directories

start=${dir:0:1}
Grab a sub-string from the directory name. In this case, the first character.

mkdir -p ${start^^}
Make a directory, use the -p flag to make sure we don't get an error when trying to create a duplicate directory. The ^^ command makes things upper case.

mv "$dir" ${start^^}
Move the directory we found into the newly created directory.

done
Finish the loop

Warnings

Only works with folders - it won't move any files in your top level directory.
Non-ASCII characters are supported. For example, 你好 is sorted into 你.
Handles directories with spaces, punctuation, and numbers at the start.
No doubt there is some horrific bug lurking in those half-dozen lines. Be a friend and drop me a note in the comments, would you?

One thought on “Sort Folders Into Alphabetic Sub-Folders”

2017-01-02 15:56

Andrew McGlashan says:

More fun, let's see if this works:

$ cat organize_files.sh
#!/bin/bash

sort_assoc_array() {
    for yr in ${years[@]}
    do
	echo $yr
    done|sort -n
}

declare -A years
declare -a yrs file

# collect files in top level directory to move
files=( $(find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '20[01][0-9]*') )

# work out which year folders are needed
for filex in ${files[@]}
do
    dirx=${filex:2:4}
    [ ! -z ${years[$dirx]} ] || {
	echo add year $dirx
	years[$dirx]=$dirx
    }
done

# sort the years
yrs=( $(sort_assoc_array) )

# create the year folders
for yr in ${yrs[@]}
do
    [ -d "$yr" ] || mkdir "$yr/"
    chown andrewm:andrewm "$yr/"
done

# move the files to their /year/ folder
for filex in ${files[@]}
do
    dirx=${filex:2:4}
    mv "$filex" "$dirx/"
done

# touch the year folder with the timestamp of the newest file for that year
for yr in ${yrs[@]}
do
    lastfileforyear=$(ls -rt ${yr}/|tail -1)
    touch -r "$yr/$lastfileforyear" "$yr/"
done

How it works

Warnings

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One thought on “Sort Folders Into Alphabetic Sub-Folders”

Andrew McGlashan says:

What are your reckons? Cancel reply