How can I get mv (or the * wildcard) to move hidden files?

Solution 1:

You can do this :

shopt -s dotglob
mv /tmp/home/rcook/* /home/rcook/

You can put

shopt -s dotglob

in your ~/.bashrc if you want it to be the default.

See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/glob

Another approach to copy the dot files:

mv /tmp/home/rcook/.[!.]* /home/rcook/

Don't use the pattern ..* as it matches .. (pointer to the parent directory). If there are files whose name begin with two dots (..something), also use the pattern ..?*.

Solution 2:

In your additions, you got errors but the code still worked. The only thing to add is that you told it only to copy the dot files. Try:

mv src/* src/.* dst/

You will still get the errors for the . and .. entries, which is fine. But the move should succeed.

~/scratch [andrew] $ mv from/* from/.* to/
mv: cannot move ‘from/.’ to ‘to/.’: Device or resource busy
mv: cannot remove ‘from/..’: Is a directory
~/scratch [andrew] $ ls -a from/ to/
from/:
.  ..

to/:
.  ..  test  .test

Solution 3:

If you ls -l in a directory, you will see . and .. among listed files. So, I think mv .* /dest takes those pointers into account. Try:

mv /tmp/home/rcook/{*,.[^.]*,..?*} /home/rcook/

this will ignore those current and parent dir pointers.

You will get an error if any of the three patterns *, [^.]* or ..?* matches no file, so you should only include the ones that match.

Solution 4:

Two possible solutions I can think of. The first is to use cp instead with its recursive option, copying the current directory to the destination.

cp -Rp . /desired/directory

then you can remove the source files in the current directory

Alternatively, if you know the files are sanely named (no spaces, wildcards, non-printable characters), you can do something like this

mv $(ls -A) /desired/directory