How to select specific files from all the files in a folder?

Hi all,

As you can see I have a lot of files in this folder, but I want only those files that contains '_020_' in it's name, and I want to save them in a new folder within the same directory. How can I do it?

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

This is easy using COPYFILE or MOVEFILE with the appropriate wildcard characters, e.g.:

P = 'absolute or relative path to where the files are saved';
copyfile(fullfile(P,'*_020_*.nc'), fullfile(P,'newfolder'));

[Ashfaq Ahmed]

Hi,

it shows

Error using copyfile
Unknown error occurred.

Error in selecting_souths (line 4)
copyfile(fullfile(P,'*_020_*.nc'),
fullfile(P,'newfolder'));
 

[Benjamin Thompson]

You may be missing the three dots "..." in the copyfile command. If you stop a line in MATLAB and put the rest of a command on a new line, you must use ... to separate them.

Answer 2

[Benjamin Thompson]

You can get a file or directory listing in MATLAB using dir, and assign that to a workspace variable. Then loop through the elements in the array to tets the name field against your criteria. See the help article "Manage Files and Folder", you have the mkdir command, movefile command. Use copyfile for the copy, which oddly enough is not mentioned with the others in that article.

D = dir('*.*')

D =

48×1 struct array with fields:

name

folder

date

bytes

isdir

datenum

>> D(1).name

ans =

'.'

>> D(3).name

ans =

'ArUcoMarker1.jpg'

mkdir myNewFolder

copyfile(D(3).name, 'myNewFolder')