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muchfresh · Jul 20, 2002, 06:45 PM

I am trying to move all my mp3 files to one directory. Itunes 3 screwed up my organization. So I built a list of all my mp3 files with:

<blockquote>code:<hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">find /Users/chico -name "*.mp3" > list</pre><hr /></blockquote>I would like to build a list of commands with awk to move each file to the current directory.

<blockquote>code:<hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">awk '{print "mv '", $0, "' ."}' list > cmd</pre><hr /></blockquote>unfortunatly *all* my .mp3 files have white spaces in their names. so I need to wrap the file name in '. But the ' char is reserved by awk.

thanatos · Jul 20, 2002, 07:06 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by muchfresh:
I am trying to move all my mp3 files to one directory. Itunes 3 screwed up my organization. So I built a list of all my mp3 files with:

<blockquote>code:<hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">find /Users/chico -name "*.mp3" > list</pre><hr /></blockquote>I would like to build a list of commands with awk to move each file to the current directory.

<blockquote>code:<hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">awk '{print "mv '", $0, "' ."}' list > cmd</pre><hr /></blockquote>unfortunatly *all* my .mp3 files have white spaces in their names. so I need to wrap the file name in '. But the ' char is reserved by awk.<hr /></blockquote>I'm not good with awk but have you tried to put a backslash infront of ' ?

muchfresh · Jul 20, 2002, 07:27 PM

backslash, fowardslash and double quotes do not work.

Camelot · Jul 20, 2002, 07:56 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by muchfresh:
I am trying to move all my mp3 files to one directory. Itunes 3 screwed up my organization. So I built a list of all my mp3 files with:

<blockquote>code:<hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">find /Users/chico -name "*.mp3" > list</pre><hr /></blockquote>I would like to build a list of commands with awk to move each file to the current directory.

<blockquote>code:<hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">awk '{print "mv '", $0, "' ."}' list > cmd</pre><hr /></blockquote>unfortunatly *all* my .mp3 files have white spaces in their names. so I need to wrap the file name in '. But the ' char is reserved by awk.<hr /></blockquote>Leaving the awk syntax question aside for a moment, why are you using awk at all?

From reading the scripts, you're using find to generate a file containing all the .mp3s on your system, you're then using awk to generate another file containing a slew of mv commands.

You are aware that find can make the move for you, aren't you?

using find's -exec switch, you can execute any shell command on each match.

for example:

find /Users/chico -name "*.mp3" -exec mv {} /path/to/new/location \;

In the above example, each found match will execute the "mv {} /path/to/new/location" command (note that {} is substituted with the filename matched by the find command).

skipjack · Jul 21, 2002, 03:07 AM

Here's guessing at something I know little about ...

It isn't an awk problem. It's a shell problem. The tcsh and csh don't allow (all? any?) escape characters.

bash will let you escape characters.