3

I have read this Copying multiple specific files from one folder to another which could not help me.

I have thousands of files in /Users/Marine/Desktop/folderGN, some of which I want to keep and some of which I want to move.

There are several files with different names and I want to move only those that have a name containing Protein or MSMS or PSms.

I want to move them from

/Users/Marine/Desktop/folderGN

to 

/Users/Marine/Descktop/myfolder
Community
  • 1
Learner Algorithm
  • 61

4 Answers4

3

To glob for the different names, you can use a for loop like so

for f in /Users/Marine/Descktop/folderGN/{*[Pp]rotein*,*MSMS*,*PSms*}; do echo mv -v -- "$f" /Users/Marine/Descktop/myfolder ; done

Remove the echo after testing to actually move the files.

I have copied your paths exactly (including the possible typo in Descktop?), but you could instead do this with relative paths:

cd /Users/Marine/Descktop/folderGN
for f in *[Pp]rotein* *MSMS* *PSms* ; do echo mv -v -- "$f" ../myfolder ; done

(remove echo after testing as before)

Zanna
  • 70,465
2

This is in fact very simple. If you want files with a certain letters/numbers in their name, and anywhere in the name, to be moved to some directory, just:

move *some_name* directory
Travis_Dudeson
  • 53
  • 6
0

This is as simple as:

mv /Users/Marine/Descktop/folderGN/*protein* /Users/Marine/Descktop/myfolder/

mv /Users/Marine/Descktop/folderGN/*PSms* /Users/Marine/Descktop/myfolder/

mv /Users/Marine/Descktop/folderGN/*MSMS* /Users/Marine/Descktop/myfolder/

This command is case sensitive. Notice that Descktop should most probably be Desktop, and that Users/Marine is more like a Mac setup, not a Ubuntu one.

alci
  • 5,839
0

In a terminal window use the usual mv command: mv /Users/Marine/Descktop/folderGN/*MSMS* /Users/Marine/Descktop/myfolder

repeat for other names (i.e. PSms, etc.) respectively.

YpsilonKah
  • 506