Moving files to a directory

Question

I wanted to move all the files having certain patterns of the current directory to a folder.

Example- I wanted to move all the files starting with nz to foobar directory. I tried it using mv but didn't work out well.

Answer 1

This will do it, though if you have any directories beginning with nz it will move those too.

for files in nz*
do
mv $files foobar
done

Edit: As shown above this totally over the top. However, for more complex pattern matches you might do something like:

for files in `ls | grep [regexp]`
do
mv $files foobar
done

Answer 2

mv nz* foobar should do it.

Answer 3

Try to use "mmv", which is installed on most Linux distros.

Answer 4

mv nz* foobar/

Answer 5

find . | grep "your_pattern" | xargs mv destination_directory

Does the following:

• Finds all files in the current directory
• Filters them according to your pattern
• Moves all resulting files to the destination directory