How to recursively move all files (including hidden) in a subfolder into a parent folder in *nix?

Question

This is a bit of an embarrassing question, but I have to admit that this late in my career I still have questions about the mv command.

I frequently have this problem: I need to move all files recursively up one level. Let's say I have folder foo, and a folder bar inside it. Bar has a mess of files and folders, including dot files and folders. How do I move everything in bar to the foo level?

If foo is empty, I simply move bar one level above, delete foo and rename bar into foo. Part of the problem is that I can't figure out what mv's wildcard for "everything including dots" is. A part of this question is this - is there an in-depth discussion of the wildcards that cp and mv commands use somewhere (googling this only brings very basic tutorials).

Solution 1

In Bash (and some others), you can use brace expansion to accomplish this in one line:

mv bar/{,.}* .

The comma separates a null and a dot, so the mv command sees filenames that match * and .*

Solution 2

This one harvests all files from subfolders and moves them to current dir

find . -type f -exec mv -iv \{} . \;

If You want to owerwrite files with same name, use

yes y | find . -type f -exec mv -iv \{} . \;

Solution 3

First thing to know about globbing --it's done by the shell, not the command. Check your shell's man page for all the details.

Solution 4

The easiest way to do this is to do it in two command, because * doesn't match .whatever

cd /foo
mv bar/* ./
mv bar/.??* ./

You do not want to use bar/.* which I found out while committing this mistake:

rm -rf ./.* 

This is a BAD THING. Anyone want to guess why? ;-)

Solution 5

mv .??* * will take care of anything except dot followed by a single character. If that's common for your situation, you can add .[a-zA-Z0-9]*. That will still leave files with names such as .;, .^, and .^I (tab). If you need to handle everything, you'll need to be a bit more complex.

mv .. `ls -f | egrep -v '^.$|^..$'

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Comments

[Mikael S]

I don't think Bash or Zsh expands .* to . and ... Zsh doesn't for me at least.

[Matt Simmons]

Mikael: I can promise that bash does (or at least did), as I had to recover user directories that I wiped out by doing just that

[Xananax]

this attempts to move '..' too, fails with message 'resource is busy'. Works nonetheless.

[HopelessN00b]

Suggested by anonymous user: To eliminate the error caused by also matching "." and "..", use this command: mv bar/{,.[!.],..?}* .