Finding filenames in a disorganized directory (Shallow Thoughts)

Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.

Sat, 28 Dec 2013

Finding filenames in a disorganized directory

I've been scanning a bunch of records with Audacity (using as a guide Carla Schroder's excellent Book of Audacity and a Behringer UCA222 USB audio interface -- audacity doesn't seem able to record properly from the built-in sound card on any laptop I own, while it works fine with the Behringer.

Audacity's user interface isn't great for assembly-line recording of lots of tracks one after the other, especially on a laptop with a trackpad that doesn't work very well, so I wasn't always as organized with directory names as I could have been, and I ended up with a mess. I was periodically backing up the recordings to my desktop, but as I shifted from everything-in-one-directory to an organized system, the two directories got out of sync.

To get them back in sync, I needed a way to answer this question: is every file inside directory A (maybe in some subdirectory of it) also somewhere under subdirectory B? In other words, can I safely delete all of A knowing that anything in it is safely stored in B, even though the directory structures are completely different?

I was hoping for some clever find | xargs way to do it, but came up blank. So eventually I used a little zsh loop: one find to get the list of files to test, then for each of those, another find inside the target directory, then test the exit code of find to see if it found the file. (I'm assuming that if the songname.aup file is there, the songname_data directory is too.)

for fil in $(find AAA/ -name '*.aup'); do
  fil=$(basename $fil)
  find BBB -name $fil >/dev/null
  if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
    echo $fil is not in BBB
  fi
done

Worked fine. But is there an easier way?

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[ 10:36 Dec 28, 2013    More linux/cmdline | permalink to this entry | ]

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