moving folders main folder and then deleting the empty folders

Hello,

I have one big folder, lets call "data", which has folders inside called 'person'.

Each "person" has specific folders, sometimes "SE1" and "SE3", sometimes SE1 and SE8, etc...,

except, i have hundreds of people

I want to put these SE1 folders into just "data" and remove the original folders they were held inside

how can I make such a script?

thank you!!

[Walter Roberson]

To confirm, you would throw away person/SE3 and person/SE8 ? Throw away everything except person/SE1 ?

I take it that "person" for this purpose is variable, such as data/Amanda/SE1 data/Amanda/SE3 data/THX1138/SE1 data/BB8/SE1 ? But SE1 is a fixed name, right? When you do the moving, what should the new name be? data/Amanda/SE1 should be renamed to... what?

[Amanda]

main folder= "data"

subfolders of "data"= "Person 1" "Person2" "Person3" etc....

subfolder of "Person1" = SE1, SE2

subfolder of "Person2" = SE3, SE8

I want SE1, SE2, SE3, SE8, etc to be removed from the folders that they are in

and put into "data" folder with the original PersonNumber folders they were in.

The deleting part is extra, I just want these files to be moved.

But I would delete Person1 once that folder has its contents emptied/moved

thanks!!

Answer 1

[Sourabh Kondapaka]

Hi @Amanda,

Approaching this in a similar fashion to your question answered here

Code:

pathToData = fullfile(pwd, 'data');

dataFolder = dir(pathToData);

dirFlags = [dataFolder.isdir];

subFolders = dataFolder(dirFlags);
subFolders = subFolders(3:length(subFolders));

for k = 1 : length(subFolders)
  person = subFolders(k).name;
  personSubFolder = dir(fullfile(pathToData, person));
  personSubFolder = personSubFolder(3:length(personSubFolder));
  
  for j = 1: length(personSubFolder)
      
      seFolder = personSubFolder(j).name;
      
      srcFolder = fullfile(pathToData, person, seFolder);  
      destFolder = fullfile(pathToData, seFolder);
      
      movefile(srcFolder, destFolder);     
      
    %       fprintf('\n \n -------------  Moving from ---------- \n \n');
    %       disp(srcFolder);
    %       fprintf('\n \n To \n \n');
    %       disp(destFolder); 

  end
  %Removing the person folder after moving all the folders within it into
  %Data folder
  rmdir(fullfile(pathToData, person));
  
end

Initial Folder Structure:

After executing the above script:

For more information on "movefile()" you can check the documention here

For more information on "dir()" you can check the documentation here

A similar question has been answered here

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Note: As your query was simple enough, a for-loop approach was sufficient. If you need to achieve something much more complicated than this, please read up about Recursion, Backtracking