How can I add text to the same line?

Question

I used this command to find mp3 files and write their name on log.txt:

find -name *.mp3 >> log.txt

I want to move the files using the mv command and I would like to append that to the log file so it could show the path where the files have been moved.

For example if the mp3 files are 1.mp3 and 2.mp3 then the log.txt should look like

1.mp3 >>>> /newfolder/1.mp3 

2.mp3 >>>> /newfolder/2.mp3

How can I do that using unix commands? Thank you!

Answer 1

You should probably use some scripting language like Perl or Python; text processing is rather awkward in the shell.

E.g. in Perl you can just postprocess the output of find, and print out what you did.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use File::Find;

my @directories_to_search=("/tmp/");

sub wanted {
  print "$File::Find::name >>> newdir/$_\n";
  # do what you want with the file, e.g. invoke commands on it using system()
}

find(\&wanted, @directories_to_search);

Doing it in Perl or similar makes some things easier than in the shell; in particular handling of funny filenames (embedded spaces, special chars) is easier. Be careful when invoking syste() commands though.

For docs on the File::Find module see http://perldoc.perl.org/File/Find.html .

Answer 2

GNU find

find /path -type f -iname "*.mp3" -printf "%f/%p\n" | while IFS="/" -r read filename path
do 
    mv "$path" "$destination"
    echo "$filename >>> $destination/$filename "  > newfile.txt
done

output

$ touch 'test"quotes.txt'
$ ls -ltr
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2009-11-20 10:30 test"quotes.txt
$ mkdir temp
$ ls -l temp
total 0
$ find . -type f -iname "*\"*" -printf "%f:%p\n" | while IFS=":" read filename path; do mv "$filename" temp ; done
$ ls -l temp
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2009-11-20 11:53 test"quotes.txt

Answer 3

Using only move:

mv -v *.mp3 tmp/ > log.txt

or using find:

find -name '*.mp3' -exec mv -v {} test/ >> log.txt \;