Relative path to source when copying or moving

command-line bash paths

8,313

This should do the trick:

mv long/path/to/a/folder{,.old}

Reference: search for Brace Expansion in bash manpage.

8,313

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Updated on September 18, 2022

Alaa Ali over 1 year
_{This might be trivial, but here goes.}

In terminal, I tend to find myself moving/renaming/copying files that are not in my current working directory instead of cd-ing to the directory of those files first. For example, I find myself doing:
```
mv long/path/to/a/folder long/path/to/a/folder.old
```
Sometimes, this can be a "long/path with spaces/to/a/folder".

My question is: is there a way/shortcut for the <target path> to be relative to the <source path>? For instance, does something like this exist:
```
mv long/path/to/a/folder ``/folder.old
```
Where `` means "the same path or the same parent path of the file/folder I'm trying to move", so in my example `` would stand for long/path/to/a/.

I know I could of course cd long/path/to/a/ and then mv folder folder.old, but that involves an extra command, and I'll end up in another working directory.
don.joey almost 11 years

Beautiful. Is there also an alternative solution with arguments?
Eric Carvalho almost 11 years

@Private I don't get it. Can you provide an example?
Eric Carvalho almost 11 years

@Private I don't know if that's possible somehow. Surely it isn't possible using positional parameters ($0, $1, ...).