From: Chad Perrin <code@...>
Date: 2012-07-04T08:35:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Copying Files

On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 03:08:35AM +0900, Alex C. wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm very new to this, but here goes. I need to copy files from one place
> to another, which sounds simple enough, but there a slight catch. They
> are each within their own folder (e.g. C:\folder\folder1\1.txt,
> C:\folder\folder2\2.txt) and I want to copy all of these files into a
> single folder so they are all grouped together

MS Windows does directory expansion at the command line -- right?  You
could do the work at the command line, then.  Given a program that takes
the names of the files you want to move, you could do something like
this:

    program_name *\*.txt -d C:\new\

Use OptionParser to deal with the -d option, then just loop through ARGV
to move each file.  For some example code doing stuff like this, you can
have a look at a simple little utility I wrote to change the encodings of
filenames:

    https://bitbucket.org/apotheon/charsetmove

If you go to the Source tab on that page, you can browse through the
files.  The relevant code is in two files: lib/charset_move.rb and
bin/cmv.  Actually, you can probably ignore the code in charset_move.rb
and just look at the cmv file, which contains all the stuff dealing with
option handling and looping through non-option command line arguments.
The only thing in charset_move that immediately strikes me as relevant to
your situation is the FileUtils.mv method.

I hope this helps.  I tried to give you enough information to make it
easy to figure the stuff out without just handing you a complete answer
so that what you learn about how to solve problems like this in Ruby will
stick better in your brain.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]