Moving files to another directory outside starting path

[joeldebruijn]

Besides renaming files I'm experimenting with using F2 to move files to other folders (and migrate from Robobasket for Windows in the process).

The use case is a folder with a Camera roll and storing them somewhere else in ' daily folders' . The files are like this YYYYMMDD_hhmm,jpg

Example:

• Source is "20231007_065837.mp4"
• Target is a directory with a path in my home folder.

I tried this:

1. f2 -f '(\d{8})_(\d{6}).(jpg|mp4)' -r "/$home/S/Joel/Media/Fotos/$1/{f}{ext}" assuming I could use $home as a variable.
2. f2 -f '(\d{8})_(\d{6}).(jpg|mp4)' -r "/home/S/Joel/Media/Fotos/$1/{f}{ext}" assuming I could use /home as an absolute path.

Both times it creates a directorystructure /home/S/Joel/Media/Fotos/.../ WITHIN my cameraroll folder.

Is moving outside the current path possible or am I missing something?

[ayoisaiah]

Hi @joeldebruijn,

It's currently not possible but, this sounds like something that should be supported for sure and it should be straightforward enough to implement.

[joeldebruijn]

Thanks! For now I just sort within the starting path and move the resulting directories by hand once a week or so.

Maybe it needs some kind of flag to choose between relative and absolute paths?

[ayoisaiah]

@joeldebruijn Yes essentially a flag to specify a different root directory will do trick, but will explore other options too 🙂

[joeldebruijn]

I just read https://github.com/ayoisaiah/f2/wiki/F2-tutorial#integration-with-other-programs and ' piping' and make combinations with other programs. Could something like this work? Replace example is random. To move every matched file with its new filename in a new place?

f2 -f '{f}.{ext}' -r '{%03d}{ext}' | mv {%03d}{ext} $HOME/Test

[ayoisaiah]

What I could do is provide a flag that can help you execute a command on each renamed file. For example:

f2 -f '{f}.{ext}' -r '{%03d}{ext}' --cmd mv {} $HOME/Test

Where {} is the file path that was renamed.

I will also add the ability to use F2's output as an input to other programs. For now, you can only use the output of other programs as input to F2

[ayoisaiah]

@joeldebruijn You can do something like this now (see latest nightly release):

f2 -f 'master' -r 'main' -x --non-interactive | xargs -I {} mv {} dist/

The --non-interactive flag instructs F2 to print the renamed paths so that it can be used as input for a different program.

[joeldebruijn]

Will try and test! Thnx!