How to move all files including hidden files into parent directory via

Question

Its must be a popular question but I could not find an answer   How to move all files via   including hidden files as well to parent directory like this   mv  path subfolder    path    This will move all files to parent directory like expected but will not move hidden files  How to do that

User · Answer

I think this is the most elegant  as it also does not try to move      mv  source path            destination path

User · Answer

Let me introduce you to my friend  dotglob    It turns on and off whether or not     includes hidden files     mkdir test   cd test   touch a b c  hidden  hi  den   ls -a        den   hi  hidden a b c    shopt -u dotglob   ls   a b c   for i in     do echo I found   i   done I found  a I found  b I found  c    shopt -s dotglob   ls    den   hi  hidden a b c   for i in     do echo I found   i   done I found   den I found   hi I found   hidden I found  a I found  b I found  c   It defaults to  off      shopt dotglob dotglob         off   It is best to turn it back on when you are done otherwise you will confuse things that assume it will be off

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You can find a comprehensive set of solutions on this in UNIX  amp  Linux s answer to How do you move all files  including hidden  from one directory to another   It shows solutions in Bash  zsh  ksh93  standard  POSIX  sh  etc     You can use these two commands together   mv  path subfolder    path      your current approach mv  path subfolder     path     this one for hidden files   Or all together  thanks pfnuesel    mv  path subfolder        path    Which expands to   mv  path subfolder    path subfolder     path     example  echo a    b expands to a b ab   Note this will show a couple of warnings   mv  cannot move     path subfolder      to  path       Device or resource busy mv  cannot remove  path subfolder        Is a directory   Just ignore them  this happens because  path subfolder       also expands to  path subfolder   and  path subfolder     which are the directory and the parent directory  See What do         and          mean when in a folder       If you want to just copy  you can use a mere   cp -r  path subfolder    path                                                note the dot    This will copy all files  both normal and hidden ones  since  path subfolder   expands to  everything from this directory   Source  How to copy with cp to include hidden files and hidden directories and their contents

User · Answer

This will move all files to parent directory like expected but will   not move hidden files  How to do that    You could turn on dotglob   shopt -s dotglob                 This would cause mv below to match hidden files mv  path subfolder    path    In order to turn off dotglob  you d need to say   shopt -u dotglob

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Alternative simpler solution is to use rsync utility   sudo rsync -vuar --delete-after --dry-run path subfolder  path    Note  Above command will show what is going to be changed  To execute the actual changes  remove --dry-run   The advantage is that the original folder  subfolder  would be removed as well as part of the command  and when using mv examples here you still need to clean up your folders  not to mention additional headache to cover hidden and non-hidden files in one single pattern   In addition rsync provides support of copying moving files between remotes and it would make sure that files are copied exactly as they originally were  -a    The used -u parameter would skip existing newer files  -r recurse into directories and -v would increase verbosity

User · Answer

By using the find command in conjunction with the mv command  you can prevent the mv command from trying to move directories  e g     and    and subdirectories  Here s one option   find  path subfolder -maxdepth 1 -type f -name     -exec mv -n     path      There are problems with some of the other answers provided  For example  each of the following will try to move subdirectories from the source path   1  mv  path subfolder    path    mv  path subfolder     path  2  mv  path subfolder        path   3  mv  source path            destination path   Also  2  includes the   and    files and 3  misses files like   foobar     barfoo  etc   You could use  mv  source path                destination path  which would include the files missed by 3   but it would still try to move subdirectories  Using the find command with the mv command as I describe above eliminates all these problems

User · Answer

My solution for this problem when I have to copy all the files  including   files  to a target directory retaining the permissions is   overwrite if already exists   yes   cp -rvp  source directory  destination directory    yes is for automatically overwriting destination files   r recursive   v verbose   p retain permissions   Notice that the source path is not ending with a    so all the files directory and   files are copied   Destination directory ends with   as we are placing contents of the source folder to destination as a whole

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