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In the directory /home/username/data I have both files and directories. Some of these filenames end in .txt (to which I'll refer as text files), others don't. The same happens in the subdirectories.

One of the subdirectories is called other_files (its full path is /home/username/data/other_files/).

I'd like to move all the files not ending with .txt in the root of /home/username/data to other_files.

I could possibly do it with a loop, but that's not what I want. I want to use commands and piping. I believe this is easy, I'm just not seeing it. A combination of mv, find, grep and xargs should do it, I'm just not sure how.

So I'm stuck in trying to match the text files (to then think of way to match everything except them). In the following, assume my current directory is /home/username/data.

First I went for find . | grep -E "*.txt", but this matches all text files, including the ones in the subdirectories.

So I tried find . | grep -E "./*.txt" just to see if I would get the same matches to then work my way towards my goal, but this doesn't match anything and this is where I'm stuck.

How do I go about doing what I described at the beginning of the question?

The simple shell loop variant (in bash):

shopt -s extglob dotglob nullglob



for pathname in ~username/data/!(*.txt); do

    ! test -d "$pathname" && mv "$pathname" ~username/data/other_files

done

The shell options set on the first line will make the bash shell enable extended globbing patterns (!(*.txt) to match all names not ending with .txt), it enables glob patterns to match hidden names, and it makes the pattern expand to nothing at all if nothing matches.

The body of the loop will skip anything that is a directory (or symbolic link to a directory) and will move everything else to the given directory.

The equivalent thing with find and GNU mv (will copy symbolic links to directories if there are any, and will invoke mv for as many files as possible at a time, but those are the only differences):

find ~username/data -maxdepth 1 ! -type d ! -name '*.txt' 

    -exec mv -t ~username/data/other_files {} +

Related:

• Understanding the -exec option of `find`

This code should move all files not ending in ".txt" to your target folder, however if you happen to have files with the same name in different paths it will throw an error.

find /home/username/data ! -name "*.txt" -type f -exec mv {} /home/username/data/other_files/ ;

find /home/username/data -maxdepth 1 -type f ! -name '*.txt' -exec mv {} /home/username/data/other_files/ ;

• maxdepth limits to the top directors


• type ensures that only files are found, not directories