How to move the first x files

I have this huge folder with thousands of unordered files. Is it feasible to move the first 5000s to a subfolder via the mv command? For now I move files with

 mv *some_pattern* ./subfolder1/

As for now, I move images quite randomly, it’s not really important if there aren’t exactly 5000 files in each subfolder. Is there a better way to do it?

Answers:

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Method 1

mv `ls | head -500` ./subfolder1/

Method 2

With zsh and its glob qualifiers:

mv -- *(D.oN[1,5000]) ./subfolder1

To move up to 5000 regular files in the order they are in the directory.

For the first 5000 in the lexicographically sorted list:

mv -- *(D.[1,5000]) ./subfolder1

If you get an error about arg list too long. You can use zsh‘s buitin mv command by issuing:

zmodload zsh/files

first.

POSIXly:

set --
for f in .* *; do
  [ "$#" -lt 5000 ] || break
  [ -f "$f" ] || continue
  [ -L "$f" ] && continue
  set -- "<a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="351175">[email protected]</a>" "$f"
done
mv -- "<a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="1c385c">[email protected]</a>" subfolder1/

Method 3

A version that is simple and supports special chars, spaces, etc.

ls -Q dir1 | head -1000 | xargs -i mv dir1/{} dir2/

For this to work as-is dir2 must exist and you have to execute it from the parent directory of dir1 and dir2.

This will move 1000 files from dir1 to dir2.

Method 4

1. Goto the directory which you want to move files from
2. run below command

   find . -name 'Hello*.gz' | head -n 5000 | xargs -I {} mv {} /data01/path/

In the find command, . (dot) denotes current directory

finds files which start with Hello and end with gz , first 5000 files will be moved to the path /data01/path/

Method 5

You might need to do something like this:

x=1
for file in *
do
    if [ "X$x" = "X#####" ]; then
        break
    fi
    mv $file <destination>
    x=`expr $x + 1`
done

This script works in bash, ksh, sh and multiple UNIX variants.

Method 6

I was able to succesfully do a move of 50,000 without the mv bash error like this

 ls | head -50000 | xargs -I{} sudo mv {} 01/

Funny enough, this was on a samba share, so the 50k limit is because Windows Explorer GUI does not like more than 60k files in a dir in general.

Method 7

Version working even in extremely large directories: moving thousand files from directory containing half million:

ls -U . | head -1000 | xargs mv -t 01/

(Note that the syntax with {} is spawning new mv for every file, while this one doesn’t)

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0