3. Organize Downloads Folder by File Type
1. Hello, World!
2. Rename Photos by Capture Date
3. Organize Downloads Folder by File Type
4. Delete Old Log Files Automatically
5. Find Duplicate Files Using MD5 Hashing
6. Generate Comprehensive File Inventory
7. Parse Web Server Logs for Performance Metrics
8. Extract Emails, URLs, and Phone Numbers from Text
9. Track Daily and Monthly Active Users from Apache Logs
10. Generate Formatted Text Reports with Column Alignment
11. Analyze Sales Transactions and Generate Revenue Reports
12. Clean and Validate CSV Data
13. Convert JSON API Responses to CSV
14. Parse and Validate Configuration Files
15. Build a CLI Calculator with Argument Parsing
16. Parse and Display Weather Data from JSON
17. Build a Simple Inventory System with Classes
18. Generate Markdown Table from CSV Data
19. Aggregate Sales Data by Time Period
20. Recursive Directory Size Calculator with Filtering
21. Parse and Transform XML Configuration Files
22. Find and Replace Across Multiple Files
23. Build a Simple Template Engine
24. CSV Data Validator with Business Rules
25. Build a Multi-Format Log Analyzer

Challenge

Problem

A messy Downloads folder with hundreds of unsorted files is a common problem. This drill teaches you to automatically organize files into categorized subdirectories based on their extensions. You'll learn file operations, directory creation, and how to handle naming conflicts when files already exist.

Difficulty: Beginner

Instructions

  1. Scan the downloads/ directory for all files
  2. Categorize files by extension into: Images (.jpg, .png, .gif), Documents (.pdf, .docx, .txt), Videos (.mp4, .avi), Audio (.mp3, .wav), Archives (.zip, .tar, .gz)
  3. Create category subdirectories if they don't exist
  4. Move files to appropriate subdirectories
  5. Handle duplicate filenames by appending a number: file.pdf -> file_1.pdf
  6. Output a summary: 'Moved: filename.ext -> Documents/filename.ext' for each file
  7. Sort output alphabetically by original filename

Files

Editable
Read-only

Hints

Hint 1

Use a hash to map categories to arrays of extensions: {'Images' => ['.jpg', '.png'], ...}

Hint 2

Dir.glob with File.file? filters out directories

Hint 3

File.extname returns the extension with the dot, use .downcase for case-insensitive matching

Hint 4

FileUtils.mkdir_p creates directories only if they don't exist

Hint 5

To handle duplicates, check File.exist? and append _1, _2, etc. to the basename

Hint 6

File.basename(path, ext) gives filename without extension

Provided Files (Read-only)

1. Basic case - organize mixed files

Input: 
organize_downloads
Expected Output: 
Moved: report.pdf -> Documents/report.pdf
Moved: song.mp3 -> Audio/song.mp3
Moved: vacation.jpg -> Images/vacation.jpg

2. Multiple file types

Input: 
organize_downloads
Expected Output: 
Moved: archive.zip -> Archives/archive.zip
Moved: notes.txt -> Documents/notes.txt
Moved: photo.png -> Images/photo.png
Moved: video.mp4 -> Videos/video.mp4

3. Duplicate filename handling

Input: 
organize_downloads
Expected Output: 
Moved: document.pdf -> Documents/document_1.pdf
+ 2 hidden test cases