How can I iterate over the contents of a directory in unix without using a wildcard?
*.jpg would yield the literal *.jpg when there are no matching files. Looks like you need nullglob. With Bash, you can do this:
#!/bin/bashshopt -s nullglob # makes glob expand to nothing in case there are no matching filesfor f in cat*.jpg dog*.jpg; do # pick only cat & dog files first3=${f:0:3} # grab first 3 characters of filename [[ -d "$first3" ]] || continue # skip if there is no such dir mv "$f" "$first3/$f" # movedone