MacOS – how to move and merge folders in OSX Mavericks

filesystemmacos

I have 2 subfolders (which in itself contains many subfolders) in my main folder.

e.g.

main folder
== subfolder1
==== folder1
==== folder2
== subfolder2
==== folder1
==== folder3
==== folder4

some things in subfolder2 are already in subfolder1. If I drag and drop subfolder2 into subfolder1, it will ask me to replace existing subfolders thus losing things. The only way to merge the folders that I know of is to press the option key. But this only makes a copy. This still requires me to delete the unneeded folder.

I want to move subfolder2 into subfolder1 and merge their contents. How can I do it? Thanks much 🙂

Best Answer

1 Quick answer

Enter this command in Terminal:

cp -r -n ./srcFolder/ ./targetFolder/
Remove the -n if you want to overwrite duplicates.

Update:
ditto source target will also do the trick.

Files in source folder overwrite any duplicates in target folder.

Add -v for details (ditto -v source target)

via How to Merge Folders on Mac OS X Without Losing All Your Files (Seriously)

2 Use Finder (surprisingly more complex)

Possibly a duplicate of Where did folder "merge" or "keep both" go in OS X 10.9 Mavericks?, but I'll sum up:

The weird thing is, the folders can't have any duplicate files if you want to merge.

If you're merging two folders that don't have any duplicate files between them, you will see the merge option if you hold the option key. enter image description here

However, if the folders you're merging contain any files with the same name, the merge option won't show up. If folders contain any duplicate items

In that case, you basically have two options:

  1. use the command line or
  2. manually remove duplicates, then click & drag + hold option to merge.
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