mjhjmtu

I'm trying to organise my directories for different classes such that each of them has a todo folder.

something like this:

|--classes/
| |--classOne/
| | |--todo/
| | | |--read.pdf
| | |--otherFiles.md
| |--classTwo
| | |--todo/
| | | |--read.pdf
| | |--otherFiles.md
| |--classThree
| | |--todo/
| | | |--read.pdf
| | |--otherFiles.md

I'm wondering if it's possible to have a folder called todo_buffer external to this hierarchy that can aggregate data from all of the individual todo folders.

It's possible to just create a small application, but is there a unix-utility that will allow me to do this? I was thinking along the line of symbolic links.

stow it will create the symlinks, and maintain them. You have to run it to get it to update. However you could use inotify-wait, to trigger an update.

#!/bin/sh

mkdir -p todo_buffer

for todo in classes/class*/todo/read.pdf
do
 class=$todo%/todo/read.pdf # Get the name of
 class=$class#classes/ # the class directory

 ln -s "../$todo" "todo_buffer/$class-read.pdf"
done

This script is supposed to be run in the parent directory of the classes directory. It will simply create a todo_buffer directory and then proceed to loop over the pathnames of the read.pdf files in the todo subdirectories of each class.

This assumes that the directory structure below the classes directory is as you have shown, with each class having a subdirectory called class<something>.

For each read.pdf file, a symbolic link is created in the todo_buffer directory.

The symbolic links points to ../classes/.../todo/read.pdf, i.e. it's relative to the location of the link. If you need absolute pathnames for the links, replace ../ with $PWD/ in the call to ln -s.

Given the following directories and files:

.
|-- classes
| |-- class-1
| | |-- otherFiles.md
| | `-- todo
| | `-- read.pdf
| |-- class-2
| | |-- otherFiles.md
| | `-- todo
| | `-- read.pdf
| `-- class-3
| |-- otherFiles.md
| `-- todo
| `-- read.pdf
`-- script.sh

7 directories, 7 files

Running the script would generate:

todo_buffer/
|-- class-1-read.pdf -> ../classes/class-1/todo/read.pdf
|-- class-2-read.pdf -> ../classes/class-2/todo/read.pdf
`-- class-3-read.pdf -> ../classes/class-3/todo/read.pdf

0 directory, 3 files

Can you clarify your requirements and the context of your problem further?

1. Would you use the "tool" to aggregate your todo_buffer folder AFTER you populated all the todo folders or BEFORE in order for you to more easily populate these todo folders?




2. Would each individual todo folders contain similar filenames (as shown in your example) but with actual different content?

Symbolic links might be what you are looking for (yet I feel you would need to write a small script) but it really depends on what you want to exactly achieve.

Symbolic link works with the same logic as a copy or a move:

ln -s src dst 

where src is the file where the link should be pointing to and dst is the symbolic name.

Suppose all your files are in todo_buffers and you only want to create symbolic links in each of the todo folders then:

cd some path/classes/classOne/todo 
ln -s path to todo_buffer/todo_buffer/read.pdf read.pdf 
cd some path/classes/classTwo/todo 
ln -s path to todo_buffer/todo_buffer/read.pdf read.pdf 
cd some path/classes/classThree/todo 
ln -s path to todo_buffer/todo_buffer/read.pdf read.pdf 
...