Moving files of specific type/extension from one directory to another?

Have a large folder filled with a large collection of different files.Ideally, I want to shift all the different files into their respective folders; so jpg files into the jpg folder etc.

Original folder : unsorted_files destination folder: jpgfolder I tried

mv /home/tony/Desktop/unsorted_files/*.jpg /home/tony/Desktop/jpgfolder

But got an error "jpgfolder" is not a directory"


Taking in account that 1) Q said "large collection ... of files" - the list of files might not all fit in one command line buffer (2,084,684 bytes on MY system); and 2) Filenames might contain funny characters ("My Stuff.jpg"); mv is not the best way. Using find, xargs, and the sure knowledge that filenames must NOT contain NUL bytes (or slashes):

find /home/tony/Desktop/unsorted_files/ -maxdepth 1 -type f -iname '*.jpg' -print0 | \
    xargs -0 --no-run-if-empty echo mv --target-directory=/home/tony/Desktop/jpgfolder

Once the echod commands look right, remove the echo, and let mv do the work.

If you have already done mv /home/tony/Desktop/unsorted_files/*.jpg /home/tony/Desktop/jpgfolder BEFORE you created the /home/tony/Desktop/jpgfolder, nothing has been lost, but you must, as other answers have said, mkdir -p /home/tony/Desktop/jpgfolder first.