How to move all files including hidden files into parent directory via *

Its must be a popular question but I could not find an answer.

How to move all files via * including hidden files as well to parent directory like this:

mv /path/subfolder/* /path/

This will move all files to parent directory like expected but will not move hidden files. How to do that?

You can find a comprehensive set of solutions on this in UNIX & Linux's answer to How do you move all files (including hidden) from one directory to another?. It shows solutions in Bash, zsh, ksh93, standard (POSIX) sh, etc.

You can use these two commands together:

mv /path/subfolder/* /path/   # your current approach
mv /path/subfolder/.* /path/  # this one for hidden files

Or all together (thanks pfnuesel):

mv /path/subfolder/{.,}* /path/

Which expands to:

mv /path/subfolder/* /path/subfolder/.* /path/

(example: echo a{.,}b expands to a.b ab)

Note this will show a couple of warnings:

mv: cannot move ‘/path/subfolder/.’ to /path/.’: Device or resource busy
mv: cannot remove /path/subfolder/..’: Is a directory

Just ignore them: this happens because /path/subfolder/{.,}* also expands to /path/subfolder/. and /path/subfolder/.., which are the directory and the parent directory (See What do “.” and “..” mean when in a folder?).

If you want to just copy, you can use a mere:

cp -r /path/subfolder/. /path/
#                     ^
#                     note the dot!

This will copy all files, both normal and hidden ones, since /path/subfolder/. expands to "everything from this directory" (Source: How to copy with cp to include hidden files and hidden directories and their contents?)

I think this is the most elegant, as it also does not try to move ..:

mv /source/path/{.[!.],}* /destination/path