Ubuntu – How to move multiple files at once to a specific destination directory

command linemv

I got a bunch of files in some directory (along with many other files) that I want to move.

Luckily, all the files I want to move contain a certain identifier in their names, so I can ls | grep IDENTIFIER to get the exact list of files to move.

But, how can I execute mv file /path/to/dest/folder/ at once, and not one by one (there's a lot of files to move)?

Best Answer

If you want to move ABC-IDENTIFIER-XYZ.ext or IDENTIFIER-XYZ.xml, you can use:

mv *IDENTIFIER* ~/YourPath/

* is a wildcard for zero or more characters, this means zero or more characters, followed by IDENTIFIER, followed by zero or more characters.

This will move all the files that contain the IDENTIFIER you specified.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to find the file which was moved without destination

If you have only two files, eg:

IDENTIFIER_1
IDENTIFIER_2

then you have overwritten IDENTIFIER_2 with the content of IDENTIFIER_1.

Example:

$ cat IDENTIFIER_1
IDENTIFIER_1

$ cat IDENTIFIER_2
IDENTIFIER_2

$ ls -og IDENTIFIER_*
-rw-rw-r-- 1  0 Mai 19 18:28 IDENTIFIER_1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 13 Mai 19 18:27 IDENTIFIER_2

$ mv IDENTIFIER_*

$ ls -og IDENTIFIER_*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 13 Mai 19 18:30 IDENTIFIER_2

$ cat IDENTIFIER_2 
IDENTIFIER_1

If you had had more than two files, then would be an error:

$ ls -og IDENTIFIER_*
-rw-rw-r-- 1  0 Mai 19 18:28 IDENTIFIER_1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 13 Mai 19 18:27 IDENTIFIER_2
-rw-rw-r-- 1  0 Mai 19 18:28 IDENTIFIER_3

$ mv IDENTIFIER_*
mv: target ‘IDENTIFIER_3’ is not a directory

For an even better explanation see @Serg.

Ubuntu – How to move some files to their parent directory

Try:

find . -path "*/flac/*" -name '*.mp3' -execdir mv -t ../ {} +

How it works

find .

Start a find command working on the current directory.
-path "*/flac/*"

Select only files with flac in their path
-name '*.mp3'

Select only files with extension .mp3.
-execdir mv -t ../ {} +

For any files found run the mv command from the directory that the file is in and move the file to the parent directory.

In addition to making this particular task easy, the option -execdir is also more secure than than the traditional -exec option.

Simplification

find . -path "*/flac/*.mp3" -execdir mv -t ../ {} +