Consider something like B/A/C.txt.
How can I move the C.txt file to its parent's parent directory so the result would be B/C.txt?
4 Answers
One way would be
mv B/A/C.txt B/ Or
cd B/A/ mv C.txt .. For educational purposes
$ man bash
Type / and fill in ^ +Parameter Expansion then press ENTER
Alternatively study the Bash guides at
An example to study:
$ f="B/A/C.txt" $ mkdir -p "${f%/*}" $ touch "$f" $ find "${f%%/*}" ... $ mv "${f}" "${f%/*}/.." $ find "${f%%/*}" B B/C.txt B/A Please note: This is NOT a general answer, there are caveats; but might be consider to be very close to it.
More to study, restarted from scratch:
$ f="B/A/C.txt" $ mkdir -p "${f%/*}" $ touch "$f" $ ( cd ${f%/*} && mv ${f##*/} .. ) on Linux terminal mv C.txt ../.. make the trick:
$ mkdir -p /tmp/A/B # create as a temporary dir $ cd /tmp/A/B # get into dir $ pwd # show were you are /tmp/A/B $ echo 'foo' > C.txt # create a file containing text foo $ mv C.txt ../.. # move file into parent dir of parent dir $ cd ../../ # get into there $ pwd # are we there? /tmp $ cat C.txt # check your file. foo You can accomplish that by doing
mv B/A/C.txt B/
or
mv B/A/C.txt B/C.txt
or
cd B/A/ mv C.txt .. 
