[glenak1911]

Hi guys, I currently have a Ubuntu Server set up that I'm using as a media server. I have movies and music that transfer over to the server in a general "downloads" folder. Then I move the folders over to the respective areas, Music files to the music folder, Videos to the video folder, etc. I get tired of manually moving folders and would like to automate this task a bit. I don't have much experience writing shell scripts, but I started writing a bash script for this task, but alas, it doesn't work! Here is what I have so far:

#!/bin/bash
CWD='pwd'
clear
echo "Starting..."
cd /home/glen/downloads
ls -l
for directory in /home/glen/downloads
do
	for file in directory
		do
			if [ "${file}" == "*.mp3" ] || [ "${file}" == "*.flac"]
			then
				cp directory /home/glen/Music
			else if [ "${file}" == "*.avi" ]||[ "${file}" == "*.mkv" ]||[ "${file}" == "*.mp4" ]
			then
				cp directory /media/sdb/Videos
		fi
echo "Finished!"
cd $CWD
done

If anyone could point me in the right direction I would be very grateful!

[jon.kiparsky]

Used to be I'd reach for perl for a job of this sort. Lately, I've been enjoying python a lot, so here's a sketch of how I'd do it in python. It's actually very simple.

extension = ".mp3"
destdir = "/home/glen/music"
srcdir = "/home/glen/downloads"

import os

#  this gives me some tools I need: listdir and rename

l = os.listdir(srcdir)

#  This gets a list of files in the source directory and stores it as l

movelist = filter(lambda file: file.find(extension)>=0, l)

#  This is a little tricky: it creates a secondary list, of those files in l which contain the string 
#  ".class" - that is, the filenames for which find(".class") returns a positive number
for file in movelist:
    os.rename(file, destdir+file)

#  This renames each file in that second list, moving it into the subdirectory. 

The only tricky part is the filter function. This takes as an argument a function and a list. The function takes one input and returns a boolean value: the returned list consists of those members of the source list for which the function returns "true" - in this case, those filenames which contain the extension we're looking for.

Hope this helps a little - although it's not the nicest code I've ever written, it should work to move some files, and you can learn a bit of python making it work more to your needs.

[GWatt]

You should probably look into the rsync utility. It will do intelligent directory transfers across machines.
http://linux.die.net/man/1/rsync