How to move items in bulk out of nested folders in MacOS.

Jul 1

Say you have a folder containing 100 subfolders, each containing 100 files.

Here’s how to move all 10,000 files in bulk into the main folder.

Step 1

Go to the parent folder of the nested folders. Press Alt, right click on the folder, and select “Copy [folder name] as a Pathname”.

Next, open Terminal and enter the command below. Replace the highlighted path with the copied path of the parent folder, then press Enter.

cd /path/to/your/parent_folder

Step 2

Copy and paste this command, and then press Enter.

find . -type f -exec mv {} . \;

It may take a while depending on the number of nested folders. Once completed, you should see all the moved files in the parent folder.

Step 2 (Alternative)

If you want to append the name of the nested folders to the front of individual file names, copy and paste this command instead, then press Enter.

find . -type f -exec sh -c 'file="{}"; parent_dir=$(dirname "$file"); first_folder=$(echo "$parent_dir" | cut -d/ -f2); mv "$file" "./${first_folder}_$(basename "$file")"' \;

Step 3

Now, you might be left with empty nested folders. Run this command again to delete them in one fell swoop.

find . -type d -empty -delete

Warning

Do not run any of the commands above twice, as you would risk deleting the moved files.

Ryan Octosa