Move files of a certain year to other directory

Linux and Unix-Like Red Hat
1

Hi all,

I have a massive amount of recording files in .WAV format stored in a directory, files dating back to 2006.

It is a huge amount of files as Linux cannot even do a listing of it all, it states: "argument list too long"

What I would like to do is the following:
Find all the files of each specific year, zip them individually in type .gz, and move them to a folder, like move all files for the year 2006 into a folder called "Rec_2006", but also zip them while moving if at all possible.
Same for 2007 and onwards ...
If they cannot be zipped it is not a train smash.

As from there I will back them up to tape to be able to free up some space on the server.

Any help at being able to do this will be much appreciated.

Thanks.

2

Is there a naming convention for the files, or is the distinction based on the modification time of the files? Or something else?

3

Apologies

The distinction is based on creation date of the files.

Examples will look similar to this:

Aug  3  2007 20070803-142942-1186144182.202734.WAV.gz
Aug  3  2007 20070803-154033-1186148433.204958.WAV.gz
Aug  3  2007 20070803-155954-1186149594.205511.WAV.gz
Aug  3  2007 20070803-162047-1186150831.206103.WAV.gz
Aug  6  2007 20070806-085914-1186383554.212839.WAV.gz
Aug  6  2007 20070806-090509-1186383909.213104.WAV.gz
Aug  6  2007 20070806-092228-1186384928.213627.WAV.gz
Aug  6  2007 20070806-100016-1186387199.383.WAV.gz

I then basically want to move all the files from 1 January to 31 December 2007 into a folder, and so on for each year.

4

So the file names are already based on the recording date? Or should the result be named as such? Because from what information you've given that's not clear.

5

That was a bad example as those were results, with the date pre-pended to the existing file names.
The date in the filename is not really needed, as long as the files for a specific year is moved to the correct folder.

Better file examples might be:

Apr 16 12:36 q1234--1271413803.344399.WAV
Apr 16 12:32 q1234--1271413847.344480.WAV
Apr 22 09:22 OUT1391--1271920802.559720.WAV
Apr 22 09:29 OUT1391--1271921281.560443.WAV
Apr 22 09:34 OUT1391--1271921538.560845.WAV

Thanks

6

How can you recognize the year of the files?

7

Since I don't have your environment, this is more or less untested:

for (( year=2000; year<=2011; year++ )); do
    echo mkdir -p rec_${year}
    touch -t "${year}01010000" reference
    find . -maxdepth 1 -iname '*.wav' '!' -newer reference \
        -exec echo mv {} rec_${year}/. \; \
        -exec echo gzip -9 rec_${year}/{} \;
done

Try it first like this, and if the results look reasonable, remove the echos.