regex - Find directories with names matching pattern and move them

Question

I have a bunch of directories like 001/ 002/ 003/ mixed in with others that have letters in their names. I just want to grab all the directories with numeric names and move them into another directory.

I try this:

file */ | grep ^[0-9]*/ | xargs -I{} mv {} newdir

The matching part works, but it ends up moving everything to the newdir...

Answer 1

I am not sure I understood correctly but here is at least something to help.

Use a combination of find and xargs to manipulate lists of files.

find -maxdepth 1 -regex './[0-9]*' -print0 | xargs -0 -I'{}' mv "{}" "newdir/{}"

Using -print0 and -0 and quoting the replacement symbol {} make your script more robust. It will handle most situations where non-printable chars are presents. This basically says it passes the lines using a char delimiter instead of a .