[X4U] Finder Question

[David Ledger]

>From: Ed Gould <edgould1948 at comcast.net>
>I started this question out with an explanation of what I had done
>accidentally and (I thought) what I was trying to accomplish and that
>was find the files I had inadvertently moved into a folder that
>contains over 100+ folders. I needed to essentially find all the
>files I had dragged and dropped accidentally into that folder. It
>looks to me like when the drop happened the finder (or who ever is
>doing the dropping) scattered the files into at least 50 different
>folders. I was trying to find the files so I could move them into the
>correct folder (I try to be organized). Instead of opening up each of
>the 100 folders I was attempting to cut the number down to a
>reasonable number. I know that 50 is less than 100 and in some cases
>the folders contain 10K of files so not only did I have to wait 30-60
>seconds for each folder to open I had to max down to the bottom as
>the files all stated with "Z".

In Terminal, go to the folder that is the parent of the 100 folders and do
ls */Z*
and it will give you the information you want.

To recover, make a new folder (called zeds if you're not already 
using that) either in the Finder or by
mkdir zeds

then move the files
mv */Z* zeds
and, as 'zeds' is a folder, all will be moved in there. Do all the 
above while in the parent of the 100 folders.

In the above 'mv' command, the shell expands the wildcard list to 
what the 'ls' showed you, so the 'mv' program sees (reduced to a 3 
file problem)
mv FolderA/Zabc FolderB/Zdef FolderC/Zghi zeds
The only gotcha with 'mv' is that if the last argument is a file and 
not a folder it would move FolderA/Zabc to that last name (replacing 
any original file), then move FolderB/Zdef to it, and finally 
FolderC/Zghi. You would then have lost FolderA/Zabc FolderB/Zdef and 
have  FolderC/Zghi renamed. So be sure 'zeds' is a folder.

David


-- 
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
david.ledger at ivdcs.co.uk
www.ivdcs.co.uk