How to use 'mv' command to move files except those in a specific directory?
Solution 1:
Lets's assume the dir structure is like,
|parent
|--child1
|--child2
|--grandChild1
|--grandChild2
|--grandChild3
|--grandChild4
|--grandChild5
|--grandChild6
And we need to move files so that it would appear like,
|parent
|--child1
| |--grandChild1
| |--grandChild2
| |--grandChild3
| |--grandChild4
| |--grandChild5
| |--grandChild6
|--child2
In this case, you need to exclude two directories child1
and child2
, and move rest of the directories in to child1
directory.
use,
mv !(child1|child2) child1
This will move all of rest of the directories into child1
directory.
Solution 2:
Since find does have an exclude option, use find + xargs + mv:
find /source/directory -name ignore-directory-name -prune -print0 | xargs -0 mv --target-directory=/target/directory
Note that this is almost copied from the find man page (I think using mv --target-directory is better than cpio).
Solution 3:
This isn't exactly what you asked for, but it might do the job:
mv the-folder-you-want-to-exclude somewhere-outside-of-the-main-tree
mv the-tree where-you-want-it
mv the-excluded-folder original-location
(Essentially, move the excluded folder out of the larger tree to be moved.)
So, if I have a/
and I want to exclude a/b/c/*
:
mv a/b/c ../c
mv a final_destination
mkdir -p a/b
mv ../c a/b/c
Or something like that. Otherwise, you might be able to get find
to help you.