Bash : Moving files according to Name

Question

Heyo guys

So I want to move all the files containg the name "American" and "Dad" into its according folder in the "TV shows" folder. I thought I had a solution to this but in the end it didn't work out. I got too many arguments because of the "*" in the if argument (at least I think that's the problem).

Can I somehow get past the "too many arguments" ? Should I try a whole different approach ?

Thanks in advance

Here's an extract of the code

if [ -d *Game* ] && [ -d *Thrones*]; then
    game=( $(find *Game* -maxdepth 0))
    mv ${game[@]} ../TV\ Shows/Game*/*s04

elif [ -d *American* ] && [ -d *Dad*] ] ; then
    dad=( $(find *American* -maxdepth 0))
    mv ${dad[@]} ../TV\ Shows/American*/*.9

Answer 1

The problem is indeed that [ -d *Game* ] is the same as [ -d "Game_of_Thrones_S04E01.mkv" "Game_of_Thrones_S04E02.mkv" ... ] which is invalid.

If you want to move all files matching *Game* or *Thrones* , you can instead do:

shopt -s nullglob      # Handle the case of having no matches
# shopt -s nocaseglob  # Uncomment to match case insensitively

for f in *Game* *Thrones*
do
  mv "$f" "../TV Shows/"Game*/*s04
done

for f in *American* *Dad*
do
  mv "$f" "../TV Shows/"American*/*.9
done

Answer 2

This should be closer to what you want:

find *Game* *Thrones* -maxdepth 0 -exec mv {} ../TV\ Shows/Game\ of\ Thrones/ \;
find *American* *Dad* -maxdepth 0 -exec mv {} ../TV\ Shows/American\ Dad/ \;

I removed the * from the destination of your mv commands because that most probably doesn't do what you expect. The mv command will move all the specified names into the last argument.