I have downloaded over 7000 ebooks from Project Gutenburg, but I have an issue. Each book has been placed in its own zip file, and each zip file has been given its own folder. My problem is that I do not want to have to go through each file and unzip them and put the ebooks in one place manually. If I can get the zip files in one place, it will be an easy job to unpack all of them with one command.
So, how do I get my files into one folder, instead of in their own subfolders?
Assuming that all the directories that contain the zip files have a common parent, you could use find to find all of the zip files then execute unzip on those files specifying the directory to extract the files to:
find /path/under/zip/folders -name "*.zip" -exec unzip {} -d /target/path \;
The wildcards approach can quickly get messy if there is more than a single level of nested folders...
I usually perform similar tasks (and most of other file operations) using Midnight Commander. Install it using
sudo apt-get install mc
Then just start it by typing 'mc', navigate to the folder your ebooks are in, hit Esc, then Ctrl-?, enter search criteria, in the result window hit [Panelize]. Now you can select all your zips by pressing * and copy/move them to the directory in another pane by hitting F5 or F6
Do you have experience using wildcards? you could do something like
mv common_part_of_folder_name*/*.zip .
where the asterisk symbol basically means "anything". If you only have the gutenberg in your directory, you can just run
mv ./*/*.zip .
to get all the zip files into your current directory. If it's much more complex than that, a Perl or shell script might be the way to go.
