Linux mv command moved data to an unknown location?

Solution 1:

If the alphabetically last entry in this directory is a directory itself, they are there.

Suppose you have the files a, b and c and the directory d. In this case,

mv /var/www/vhosts/website/httpdocs/magento/*

expands to

mv /var/www/vhosts/website/httpdocs/magento/a /var/www/vhosts/website/httpdocs/magento/b /var/www/vhosts/website/httpdocs/magento/c /var/www/vhosts/website/httpdocs/magento/d

which is a command to move everything to d. Look there if there is anything.

If d wasn't a directory, mv should have complained about that.

Solution 2:

To extend the reply of glglgl:

The command line wildcard expansion in Unix-like operating systems is performed by the shell. In most cases with Linux it would be bash. Its man page explicitly states that the wildcard expansion will be alphabetically sorted. The same should be valid for most of Bourne-compatible shells.