Hi,
I’m looking for a package that will allow me to configure some rules for moving folders and then watch a folder and automatically move folders or files that match rules to a certain other directory. Does something like this exist?
The use case is that I have data being saved to a single directory by other devices, and then I would like to reorganize it based on the file or folder name.
Or anyone have any other ideas of how to do this?
inotifywait or watchexec can both watch a directory for changes then execute anything you want.
inotifywait or watchexec
Excellent suggestion.
Maybe this could help?
You can use find utility for that. I’m not at Linux machine right now, so maybe I can make mistake in commands, but something like this should work:
find /path/to/data/folder -name “type1name” -exec mv -t /path/to/dest/folder {} +
In this example, command find every file containing “type1name” in its name in folder /path/to/data/folder and move it into /path/to/dest/folder.
So if you have folder “~/data/all_data” containing files like “temperature_2023-06-30.csv”, " temperature_2023-06-29.csv", “power_2023-06-30.csv” and “power_2023-06-29.csv”, do:
mkdir ~/data/temperature
mkdir ~/data/power
find ~/data/all_data -name “temperature*” -exec mv -t ~/data/temperature {} +
find ~/data/all_data -name “power*” -exec mv -t ~/data/ {} +
More, you can tweak it into for examplee filtering according to current date and run that script every day.
systemd-path is the cleanest and most portable solution. You define a path service to watch your directory for changes and trigger another service to perform certain actions then. It uses inotify.
https://man.archlinux.org/man/systemd.path.5.en
Here is a full example from our currently so beloved redhat: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/introduction-path-units
Best I can think of would be a shell script combined with Cron.
But I’d love see alternatives. Ideal with a gui imo
If you don’t find the application you’re looking for maybe you can write a bash script that runs on a Cron job. It’s possible if you’re just talking about file/folder names