Move all files from subdirectories to current directory?

Question

How can I move the files contained in all subdirectories to the current directory, and then remove the empty subdirectories?

I found this question, but adapting the answer to:

mv * .

did not work; I received a lot of warnings looking like:

mv: wil and ./wil are identical

The files contained in the subdirectories have unique names.

Solution 1

You can also use the -mindepth option:

find . -type f -mindepth 2 -exec mv -i -- {} . \;

(Together with -maxdepth you could also limit the hierarchy levels from which to collect the files.)

I used mv -i (“interactive”) to make mv ask before overwriting files. With a lot of subdirectories, there may be name clashes you'd like to be warned about.

The -- option stops option processing, so mv doesn't get confused by filenames starting with a hyphen.

Clean up the whole bunch of empty subdirectories with

find . -depth -mindepth 1 -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} \;

Solution 2

Try this:

find ./*/* -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -J % mv % .

More Info: Try the find-stamement alone, it should give you a list with all the files you want to move (leave out the -print0). Example:

probe:test trurl$ find ./*/* -type f
./test_s/test_s_s/testf4
./test_s/test_s_s/testf5
./test_s/testf1
./test_s/testf2
./test_s/testf3
./test_s2/testf6
./test_s2/testf7

with -print0 and xargs you are now creating a list of statements to be executed. The -J % flag means, insert the list element here, so mv $FILE . is executed for every file found.

The above is working for the BSD xargs. If you're using the GNU-version (Linux) take -I % instead of -J %

Solution 3

mv */* .

It will move all files from all subdirectories to current directory.

If you need some cleanup, you could use

find . -type d -empty -delete

It will delete all empty subdirectories.

Comments

[G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica']

That won't find files that don't have a . in their name, will it?

[Filnor]

Is there also a way to skip the question for overwriting the files by not overwrting them?

[Florian Jenn]

Options for mv: -n, --no-clobber: do not overwrite an existing file. You might be interested in -b, --backup, too.