mjhjmtu

I am looking for a shell script that would flatten a given directory structure but ONLY if there is only 1 subfolder in that directory. For instance: the script would flatten this folder:

/folder
 /subfolder
 file1
 file2

into:

/folder
 file1
 file2

but would skip (do nothing) this folder

/folder
 /subfolder1
 /subfolder2 

Thank you so much in advance.

Steve

A somewhat naive approach:

#!/bin/sh

for dir do

 # get list of directories under the directory $dir
 set -- "$dir"/*/

 # if there are more than one, continue with the next directory
 # also continue if we didn't match anything useful
 if [ "$#" -gt 1 ] || [ ! -d "$1" ]; then
 continue
 fi

 # the pathname of the subdirectory is now in $1

 # move everything from beneath the subdirectory to $dir
 # (this will skip hidden files)
 mv "$1"/* "$dir"

 # remove the subdirectory
 # (this will fail if there were hidden files)
 rmdir "$1"

done

Using bash:

#!/bin/bash

for dir do

 # get list of directories under the directory $dir
 subdirs=( "$dir"/*/ )

 # if there are more than one, continue with the next directory
 # also continue if we didn't match anything useful
 if [ "$#subdirs[@]" -gt 1 ] || [ ! -d "$subdirs[0]" ]; then
 continue
 fi

 # the pathname of the subdirectory is now in $subdirs[0]

 # move everything from beneath the subdirectory to $dir
 # (this will skip hidden files)
 mv "subdirs[0]"/* "$dir"

 # remove the subdirectory
 # (this will fail if there were hidden files)
 rmdir "$subdirs[0]"

done

Both scripts would be run as

$ ./script.sh dir1 dir2 dir3

or

$ ./script.sh */

to run it across all directories in the current directory.

Apart from the caveats in the code, this would also fail to relink symbolic links. To do that, you would have to go through all possible locations in the filesystem and look for links pointing into the subdirectory under /folder and recreate them so that they point to the correct new place. I will not write the code far that here.

Also, no check is made when moving things out of the subdirectory to make sure that there are no entries with the same names already existing under /folder.