ryv's blog

Periodically I get a large number of files arrive from various servers that have a similar naming convention. I need to manage these files quickly to push them into various folders. Here is an example of the naming convention: ServerXX.FileZZZZ.bak So there are two elements to these files - the server ID (XX) and the number of the file - from 0000 to 9999. I want to search for files from Server01 and copy all of them to a directory. How do I do this quickly? With the magic of bash command line scripting! So here is what the single line script looks like: for i in `find . -name Server01.File*.bak` ; do cp $i /path/to/storage/Server01/ ; done To break this down a bit: for i in `find . -name Server01.File*.bak` assigns all files that match the name Server01.File*.bak to the variable i. The * serves as a wildcard, so it matches all the files from 0000 to 9999. The next bit: do cp $i /path/to/storage/Server01/ copies all the files that are assigned to the $i variable to t