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I have a directory with sub-directories that contains images.I want to make a new directory and move all the images in there and then sort them to sub-directories with the order year/month/day of modification.

I thought of using find and mv to move all the images to the new directory, find the date of first image in directory, make a sub-directory named after the year of this image and then find and move all the images with the same year in that sub-directory.I will do this for every image in the main directory and then I will repeat the procedure in every sub-directory for month and then day.

My problem is that I believe that there must be a sorter way for me to do this.

Any ideas?

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With zsh:

zmodload zsh/files # bring in builtin versions of mkdir and mv to speed things up zmodload zsh/stat for file (**/*.jpg(N.)) { zstat -F %Y/%m/%d -A date +mtime -- $file && mkdir -p $date && mv -- $file $date }

If you don't have zsh and can't install it, with GNU tools, you could minimize the number of commands run with:

(export LC_ALL=C find . -name '*.jpg' -type f -printf '%TY/%Tm/%Td\0%p\0' | gawk -v 'RS=\0' -v q="'" ' function shquote(s) { gsub(q, q "\\" q q, s) return q s q } { date = $0; getline file dir[date] = dir[date] " " shquote(file) } END { printf "mkdir -p ." for (d in dir) printf " %s", d print " || exit" for (d in dir) print "mv" dir[d], d }' | sh )

(you may want to remove the | sh at first to check that it does what you want).

Note that neither of those will guard against conflicts. For instance, if you have a a/foo.jpg and b/foo.jpg both last modified on 2017-11-01, they will both be moved to 2017/11/01/foo.jpg, one of them overwriting the other. You may want to add the -i flag to mv to guard against it.

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