Linux move all but one folder

How to Move Files Using Linux Commands or File Managers

Learn how to move files with Linux commands in this tutorial from our archives.

There are certain tasks that are done so often, users take for granted just how simple they are. But then, you migrate to a new platform and those same simple tasks begin to require a small portion of your brain’s power to complete. One such task is moving files from one location to another. Sure, it’s most often considered one of the more rudimentary actions to be done on a computer. When you move to the Linux platform, however, you may find yourself asking “Now, how do I move files?”

If you’re familiar with Linux, you know there are always many routes to the same success. Moving files is no exception. You can opt for the power of the command line or the simplicity of the GUI – either way, you will get those files moved.

Let’s examine just how you can move those files about. First we’ll examine the command line.

Command line moving

One of the issues so many users, new to Linux, face is the idea of having to use the command line. It can be somewhat daunting at first. Although modern Linux interfaces can help to ensure you rarely have to use this “old school” tool, there is a great deal of power you would be missing if you ignored it all together. The command for moving files is a perfect illustration of this.

The command to move files is mv . It’s very simple and one of the first commands you will learn on the platform. Instead of just listing out the syntax and the usual switches for the command – and then allowing you to do the rest – let’s walk through how you can make use of this tool.

The mv command does one thing – it moves a file from one location to another. This can be somewhat misleading, because mv is also used to rename files. How? Simple. Here’s an example. Say you have the file testfile in /home/jack/ and you want to rename it to testfile2 (while keeping it in the same location). To do this, you would use the mv command like so:

mv /home/jack/testfile /home/jack/testfile2

or, if you’re already within /home/jack:

mv testfile testfile2

The above commands would move /home/jack/testfile to /home/jack/testfile2 – effectively renaming the file. But what if you simply wanted to move the file? Say you want to keep your home directory (in this case /home/jack) free from stray files. You could move that testfile into /home/jack/Documents with the command:

mv /home/jack/testfile /home/jack/Documents/

With the above command, you have relocated the file into a new location, while retaining the original file name.

What if you have a number of files you want to move? Luckily, you don’t have to issue the mv command for every file. You can use wildcards to help you out. Here’s an example:

You have a number of .mp3 files in your

/ – is an easy way to represent your home directory – in our earlier example, that would be /home/jack/) and you want them in

/Music. You could quickly move them with a single command, like so:

That command would move every file that ended in .mp3 from the Downloads directory, and move them into the Music directory.

Should you want to move a file into the parent directory of the current working directory, there’s an easy way to do that. Say you have the file testfile located in

/Downloads and you want it in your home directory. If you are currently in the

/Downloads directory, you can move it up one folder (to

The “../” means to move the folder up one level. If you’re buried deeper, say

/Downloads/today/, you can still easily move that file with:

Just remember, each “../” represents one level up.

As you can see, moving files from the command line, isn’t difficult at all.

There are a lot of GUIs available for the Linux platform. On top of that, there are a lot of file managers you can use. The most popular file managers are Nautilus (GNOME) and Dolphin (KDE). Both are very powerful and flexible. I want to illustrate how files are moved using the Nautilus file manager (on the Ubuntu 13.10 distribution, with Unity as the interface).

Nautilus has probably the most efficient means of moving files about. Here’s how it’s done:

Open up the Nautilus file manager.

Locate the file you want to move and right-click said file.

From the pop-up menu (Figure 1) select the “Move To” option.

When the Select Destination window opens, navigate to the new location for the file.

Once you’ve located the destination folder, click Select.

This context menu also allows you to copy the file to a new location, move the file to the Trash, and more.

If you’re more of a drag and drop kind of person, fear not – Nautilus is ready to serve. Let’s say you have a file in your home directory and you want to drag it to Documents. By default, Nautilus will have a few bookmarks in the left pane of the window. You can drag the file into the Document bookmark without having to open a second Nautilus window. Simply click, hold, and drag the file from the main viewing pane to the Documents bookmark.

If, however, the destination for that file is not listed in your bookmarks (or doesn’t appear in the current main viewing pane), you’ll need to open up a second Nautilus window. Side by side, you can then drag the file from the source folder in the original window to the the destination folder in the second window.

If you need to move multiple files, you’re still in luck. Similar to nearly every modern user interface, you can do multi-select of files by holding down the Ctrl button as you click each file. After you have selected each file (Figure 2), you can either right-click one of the selected files and the choose the Move To option, or just drag and drop them into a new location.

The selected files (in this case, folders) will each be highlighted.

Moving files on the Linux desktop is incredibly easy. Either with the command line or your desktop of choice, you have numerous routes to success – all of which are user-friendly and quick to master.

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Linux command to move a directory

My old and new directory have same folders and files inside.

mv: cannot move `./xxxxxx’ to a subdirectory of itself

How can I move it?

5 Answers 5

You should use mv -if old/* new/ without the trailing * .

This is because it unrolled to

i.e. move everything into new/baz

This is not what you wanted.

It works. What are You trying to achieve? Could You please write a short example of what the input data should look like and what the output data should look like? The truth is I have no idea what You are trying to do 🙂 Help me help You.

note that mv a/* b/ don’t move files .* (file name start with ‘.’) in a/ to b/

If you are copying from an ext2/3/4 file system to a FAT32 file system, and a filename has an invalid character for FAT32 naming conventions, you get this terribly annoying and incorrect as hell error message. How do I know? I wrestled with this bug — yes, it’s a KERNEL BUG — for 6 hours before it dawned on me. I thought it was a shell interpreter error, I thought it was an «mv» error — I tried multiple different shells, everything. Try this experiment: on an ext file system, «touch ‘a:b'» them «mv» it to a FAT32 file system. Try it, you’ll enjoy (hate) the results. The same is true for ‘ ‘ (\074 and \076).

Thanks for «man mv» — that’s a real big help, don’t quit your day job.

Might be you got the answer but above answer is not working for me. and finally lots of researching I got the answer. (Issue is due to files-ownership)
and just put sudo before the command and its working. 🙂 Same thing for cp and mv command.

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How to move all files and folders via mv command [duplicate]

How can I move all files and folders from one directory to another via mv command?

7 Answers 7

(D) to include dot-files.

This works for me in Bash (I think this depends on your shell quite a bit. )

This works for me in Bash 4.2.46, it moves all files and folders including hidden files and folders to another directory

Notice that .[^.]* means all hidden files except . and ..

I’d say it’s a bit boring, but really bullet-proof (GNU) way is:

cd /SourceDir && find ./ -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -exec mv -t /Target/Dir <> +

P. S. Now you can possibly see why lots of people do prefer Midnight Commander, though.

If you only want to do a cut and paste-like action there is a simple way that worked for me:

It will move the folder named dir_source located in /media to the directory $HOME/Documents/

yet another way just for the heck of it (because I love convoluted ways to do things I guess)

the -Q and the -A are not POSIX, however the -A is fairly prevalent, and to not use the -Q you need to change the IFS (which then means you don’t need the eval but need to quote the variable)

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

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:

This will move all files to parent directory like expected but will not move hidden files. How to do that?

7 Answers 7

You can find a comprehensive set of solutions on this in UNIX & 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:

Which expands to:

(example: echo a<.,>b expands to a.b ab )

Note this will show a couple of warnings:

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:

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?)

I think this is the most elegant, as it also does not try to move .. :

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 :

In order to turn off dotglob , you’d need to say:

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:

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:

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.

Alternative simpler solution is to use rsync utility:

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.

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How do I move all files from one folder to another using the command line?

I would like to know how could I move all files from a folder to another folder with a command line.

Let’s say I’m in my Downloads folder and there are a 100 files that I would like to move to my Videos folder, without having to write all the files name.

12 Answers 12

Open a terminal and execute this command:

It will move all the files and folders from Downloads folder to Videos folder.

To move all files, but not folders:

If you are interested in moving all files (but not folders) from Downloads folder to Videos folder, use this command

To move only files from the Download folders, but not from sub-folders:

If you want to move all files from the Downloads folder, but not any files within folders in the Download folder, use this command:

here, -maxdepth option specifies how deep find should try, 1 means, only the directory specified in the find command. You can try using 2 , 3 also to test.

See the Ubuntu find manpage for a detailed explanation

/Videos/») won’t move dot files.

/Videos can be more efficiently done with -exec mv -t

/Videos/ does not work for hidden files

It will move all the files including subfolders in the directory you want to mv . If you want to cp (copy) or rm (remove) you will need the -r (recursive) option to include subfolders.

/ in the prefix of the folder names doesn’t always work (doesn’t work on bash and git atleast)

For the simple case:

If you want to move dot (hidden) files too, then set the dotglob shell option.

This leaves the shell option set.

For one time dotglob use, run the commands in a subshell:

/Videos) only moves (cuts) the contents (including the hidden files). In this case, both the origin and destination folders must exist already. At the end, the origin directory becomes empty.

It’s possible by using rsync , for example:

-a , —archive : Archive mode; equals -rlptgoD (no -H , -A , -X ).

-u , —update : Skip files that are newer on the receiver.

—remove-source-files This tells rsync to remove from the sending side the files (meaning non-directories) that are a part of the transfer and have been successfully duplicated on the receiving side.

If you’ve root privileges, prefix with sudo to override potential permission issues.

To move a directory with or without content to its new name just like how you would use the mv command to rename a file:

• -T treats the destination as a normal file
• dir1 is the original name of the directory
• dir2 is the new name of the directory

NB: dir2 doesn’t have to exist.

I hope this saves someone a lot of time, as a noob, before this, I would create a directory with the new name and then move the contents of the directory to the directory created earlier.

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