Renaming directories based on a pattern in Bash
You could write your code this way so that it covers both the cases:
for dir in *\ -\ *; do [[ -d "$dir" ]] || continue # skip if not a directory sub="${dir#* - }" if [[ ! -e "$sub" ]]; then mv "$dir" "$sub" fidoneBefore running the script:
$ ls -1d */user1 [files.sentfrom.com] - Directory-Subject/www.ibm.com - Directory-SubjectAfter:
$ ls -1d */Directory-Subject/www.ibm.com - Directory-Subject/ # didn't move because directory existed already