Bash moving hidden files, reset dotglob

bashdot-filesmv

I wanted to move all files, including starting with dot (hidden) and folders (recursively).

So I used the following commands

shopt -s dotglob nullglob
mv ~/public/* ~/public_html/

and it worked.

But do I need to reset anything after doing shopt -s dotglob nullglob? Doesn't it change how commands like mv operate? Because I would like it changed back.

Best Answer

Yes, you would have to unset those options (with shopt -u nullglob dotglob) afterwards if you wanted the default globbing behaviour back in the current shell.

You could just do

mv ~/public/* ~/public/.* ~/public_html/

That would still generate an error without nullglob set if one of the patterns didn't match anything, obviously, but would work without having to set either option. It would probably also say something about failing to rename . since it's a directory, but that too isn't stopping it from moving the files.

A better option may be to use rsync locally:

rsync -av ~/public/ ~/public_html/

and then delete ~/public.

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Bash: moving files with spaces

Never, ever use for foo in $(cat bar). This is a classic mistake, commonly known as bash pitfall number 1. You should instead use:

while IFS= read -r file; do mv -- "$file" "new_place/$file"; done < file_list.txt

When you run the for loop, bash will apply wordsplitting to what it reads, meaning that a strange blue cloud will be read as a, strange, blue and cloud:

$ cat files 
a strange blue cloud.txt
$ for file in $(cat files); do echo "$file"; done
a
strange
blue
cloud.txt

Compare to:

$ while IFS= read -r file; do echo "$file"; done < files 
a strange blue cloud.txt

Or even, if you insist on the UUoC:

$ cat files | while IFS= read -r file; do echo "$file"; done
a strange blue cloud.txt

So, the while loop will read over its input and use the read to assign each line to a variable. The IFS= sets the input field separator to NULL^*, and the -r option of read stops it from interpreting backslash escapes (so that \t is treated as slash + t and not as a tab). The -- after the mv means "treat everything after the -- as an argument and not an option", which lets you deal with file names starting with - correctly.

^* _{This isn't necessary here, strictly speaking, the only benefit in this scenario is that keeps read from removing any leading or trailing whitespace, but it is a good habit to get into for when you need to deal with filenames containing newline characters, or in general, when you need to be able to deal with arbitrary file names.}

Best Answer

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Bash: moving files with spaces

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