How can I move the files contained in all subdirectories to the current directory, and then remove the empty subdirectories?
I found this question, but adapting the answer to:
mv * .
did not work; I received a lot of warnings looking like:
mv: wil and ./wil are identical
The files contained in the subdirectories have unique names.
You can also use the -mindepth option:
find . -type f -mindepth 2 -exec mv -i -- {} . \;
(Together with -maxdepth you could also limit the hierarchy levels from which to collect the files.)
I used mv -i (“interactive”) to make mv ask before overwriting files. With a lot of subdirectories, there may be name clashes you'd like to be warned about.
The -- option stops option processing, so mv doesn't get confused by filenames starting with a hyphen.
Clean up the whole bunch of empty subdirectories with
find . -depth -mindepth 1 -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} \;
mv */* .
It will move all files from all subdirectories to current directory.
If you need some cleanup, you could use
find . -type d -empty -delete
It will delete all empty subdirectories.
Try this:
find ./*/* -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -J % mv % .
More Info: Try the find-stamement alone, it should give you a list with all the files you want to move (leave out the -print0). Example:
probe:test trurl$ find ./*/* -type f
./test_s/test_s_s/testf4
./test_s/test_s_s/testf5
./test_s/testf1
./test_s/testf2
./test_s/testf3
./test_s2/testf6
./test_s2/testf7
with -print0 and xargs you are now creating a list of statements to be executed. The -J % flag means, insert the list element here, so mv $FILE . is executed for every file found.
The above is working for the BSD xargs. If you're using the GNU-version (Linux) take -I % instead of -J %
1 quick trick, only works if your files have extensions (with a dot):
mv *.* subdir/
mv .* subdir/
Just run this command:-)
mv **/*.* .
