Trouble moving lots of music files

Question

Hi,
First of all, thank you for reading my post. Here's what I wanted to do: In the music folder of iTunes, every music files are classified in their respective Artist/Album folders. I wanted to take all those files and move them to one folder. Here's what I used:
find . -name '*.mp3' -exec mv {} ./Music \;
It created a single file named Music with all my files. First of all, is there a way to recover all those files or are they lost? Second, what was the command I should have used instead of this.
Thank you again for the help
iBook G4 (12)   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Answer 1

Hi Francis,
> It created a single file named Music with all my files.
   Ouch! I'm afraid that I don't think that's possible. Did a directory named "Music" already exist in the working directory at the time you executed the command? If it did exist then the command should have done exactly what you wanted; it should have moved all of the MP3 files into that directory, barring name collision.
   If the directory did not exist then the mv command would have no way of knowing that you meant it to be a directory. The first MP3 found would have been renamed to "Music" and moved to the current working directory. However, all of the other mv commands probably did the same and each one overwrote the previous one. Therefore I expect that your "Music" file is actually just the last MP3 file found and the rest have been lost. I'm afraid that you'll have to restore from backup.
   I realize that it's closing the barn door after the horses are out but the mv command provides -i and -n options to avoid this problem.
Gary
~~~~
   And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference
   between null and space, because that's exactly how
   much difference there is.
      -- Larry Wall in <[email protected]>