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I have some directories of files copied from my security camera that I would like to organize into sub-directories by file date. So for example;

-rwxrwxrwx 0 root root 4935241 Jul 19 2012 DSCN1406.JPG -rwxrwxrwx 0 root root 4232069 Jul 19 2012 DSCN1407.JPG -rwxrwxrwx 0 root root 5015956 Jul 20 2012 DSCN1408.JPG -rwxrwxrwx 0 root root 5254877 Jul 21 2012 DSCN1409.JPG

I would like a script that runs to see the files in that directory, then create the 3 needed directories named like;

drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Sep 2 16:49 07-19-2012 drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Sep 2 16:49 07-20-2012 drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Sep 2 16:49 07-21-2012

And then move the files into the appropriate directories. Does anyone have any suggestions on a good scriptable way to accomplish this?

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  • Is GNU find or GNU stat available? Commented Mar 1, 2013 at 1:17

2 Answers 2

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On Linux and Cygwin, you can use date -r to read out the modification date of a file.

for x in *.JPG; do d=$(date -r "$x" +%Y-%m-%d) mkdir -p "$d" mv -- "$x" "$d/" done

(I use the unambiguous, standard and easily-sorted YYYY-MM-DD format for dates.)

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  • Perfect Gilles once I drop cased the .jpg it worked beautifully. Thank you! Commented Mar 1, 2013 at 1:37
  • A shorter date format, same as %Y-%m-%d: date +%F Commented Sep 3, 2018 at 16:27
  • @Acumenus No it won't. The date directories don't match *.JPG. Commented Nov 7, 2020 at 21:44
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This also checks if the object to be organized is a file or not. This is an important check, failing which a date's directory can itself get moved into another date. In effect this makes the answer more idempotent, allowing multiple runs.

dir="mention the directory path" cd "$dir" for x in *; do if [ -f "$x" ]; then d=$(date -r "$x" +%Y/%B/%d) mkdir -pv "$d" mv -v -- "$x" "$d/" fi done
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