Flatten a directory structure: There may be times when you want to consolidate all the files in a directory and its sub-directories (or a folder and its sub-folders) into a single directory or folder. For example, you may have a folder with sub-folders for years, and other sub-folders in each year folder for months, and you may want to move files in the month folders all to the top level.



Doing this manually is a complex and time-consuming process. While you might be able to do this by using a search - for example, if all the files are, say, Excel files, you can search for Excel files in the top folder, then just copy them all to a new folder - if there are lots of different types of files, this wouldn't make things easier.



Fortunately, there's a way to do this from a command line. On the BedroomLAN blog, Alexios presents two commands that will do this:



cd $ROOT_DIRECTORY

find -type f -print0 | xar ...