As a rather novice Linux user, I can't seem to find how to do this. I am trying to move unique files all in one directory into another directory. Example:
$ ls vehicle car.txt bicycle.txt airplane.html train.docx (more files) I want car.txt, bicycle.txt, airplane.html, and train.docx inside vehicle.
Right now I do this by moving the files individually:
$ mv car.txt vehicle $ mv bicycle.txt vehicle ... How can I do this in one line?
44 Answers
You can do
mv car.txt bicycle.txt vehicle/ (Note that the / above is unnecessary, I include it merely to ensure that vehicle is a directory.)
You can test this as follows:
cd #Move to home directory mkdir temp #Make a temporary directory touch a b c d #Make test (empty) files ('touch' also updates the modification date of an existing file to the current time) ls #Verify everything is there mv a b c d temp/ #Move files into temp ls #See? They are gone. ls temp/ #Oh, there they are! rm -rf temp/ #DESTROY (Be very, very careful with this command) Shorthand command to move all .txt file
You can try using a wildcard. In the code below, * will match all the files which have any name ending with .txt or .docx, and move them to the vehicle folder.
mv *.txt *.docx vehicle/ If you want to move specific files to a directory
mv car.txt bicycle.txt vehicle/ Edit: As mentioned in a comment, If you are moving files by hand, I suggest using mv -i ... which will warn you in case the destination file already exists, giving you a choice of not overwriting it. Other 'file destroyer' commands like cp & rm too have a -i option
mv command in linux allow us to move more than one file into another directory. All you have to do is write the name of each file you want to move, seperated by a space.
Following command will help you:
mv car.txt bicycle.txt airplane.html train.docx vehicle
or
mv car.txt bicycle.txt airplane.html train.docx vehicle/
both of them will work.
You can move multiple files to a specific directory by using mv command. In your scenario it can be done by,
mv car.txt bicycle.txt airplane.html train.docx vehicle/ The point you must note is that the last entry is the destination and rest everything except mv is source.
One another scenario is that the destination is not present in our directory,then we must opt for absolute path in place of vehicles/.
Note: Absolute path always starts from / ,which means we are traversing from root directory.
