file for input to /bin/mv

[daniel.flynn]

filename is a list of absolute paths to files on individual lines

I want to use filename as input to /bin/mv:

mv `cat filename` destination/

Problem is there are whitespaces in the pathnames. And if I escape the whitespaces

sed -E 's/\ /\\ '/g filename > filenameclean

mv `cat filenameclean` destination/

still fails (operating on paths with spaces as multiple arguements)

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

[vsemaska]

Try enclosing filename in double quotes:

mv `cat "filename"` destination/

[bdrumright]

"mv `cat filename` destination/"
or maybe
cat filename | mv destination
mv `cat filename` "destination"
one has to work

[Cabhan]

The problem here is that by using `cat filename`, you are printing out the file (spaces and all) to the commandline and then relying on Bash to parse them (and Bash breaks on spaces).

There are two ways to do this.

The first is using a loop to go through the file:

exec 3< filename; while read line <&3; do mv "$line" destination/; done

We read each line of filename, inserting each line into the 'mv' command.

The second way to do this is to use a program written for this purpose: xargs. The job of xargs is to read many lines and run the same command on each of them:

xargs -I{} mv "{}" destination/ < filename

Here we redirect xargs's STDIN to be from filename, and let it essentially do the same thing as the loop above.

Does this make sense?

[daniel.flynn]

xargs -I{} mv "{}" destination/ < filename

Does this make sense?

This works perfectly, thank you. I looked at xargs before but didn't have the syntax right. Thank you for clearing it up for me.