How to move all files plus hidden to folder down

• You can use the advanced globbing patterns in some shells to match all the files in a directory except for those matching a particular pattern. For example, in ksh, bash or zsh, the command

  shopt -s extglob   ## needed in bash only
  setopt ksh_glob   ## needed in zsh only
  mv /source/!(*.bak) /destination
  

  will move all files in /source to /destination except for the files matching *.bak. In zsh, you can also write /source/^*.bak if you first run setopt extended_glob, and more generally (again requiring setopt extended_glob) /source/*~*.bak (or /source/a*~*.bak for all files whose name begins with a except for .bak files, etc).

• Zsh has a mass copy/move/link command that can be used, amongst others, to move all files except for those matching a pattern. For example, the following command moves all files except *.bak from /source to target, and adds .bak to their name in the process:

  autoload zmv
  zmv '/source/(*)~*.bak' '/target/$1.bak'
  

• There are several commands called rename floating around. On Debian and Ubuntu, /usr/bin/rename is a perl script that moves files to a new name generated by a perl expression. You can exclude files from renaming by not generating a new name if the file is to be excluded. For example, the following command (using this particular rename program) moves all files except *.bak from /source to /target:

  rename 's!/source!/target! unless m!\.bak$!' /source/*
  

• You can use the find command to select the files you want to move. For example, the following command moves all regular files except *.bak in /source or a subdirectory into /target (note that the directory structure is collapsed):

  find /source -type f \! -name '*.bak' -exec mv {} /target/ \;
  

  or (more efficient if there are many files to move)

  find /source -type f \! -name '*.bak' -exec sh -c 'mv "$@" "$0"' /target/ {} +
  

• rsync is a generalization of cp and scp with very powerful include/exclude rules. For example, the following command copies all files except *.bak in /source or a subdirectory into /target, respecting the directory structure:

  rsync -a --exclude '*.bak' /source/ /target/
  

• pax is (amongst other things) another cp on steroids. Its exclusion rules are not nearly as powerful as rsync's, but it has the additional ability to rename files as they are copied. If you rename a file to the empty string, it's excluded from the copy. For example, the following command copies all files except *.bak in /source or a subdirectory into /target, and renames the files to .bak in passing.

  cd /source && pax -rw -pp -s '/.*\.bak$//' -s '/$/.bak/' . /target/
  

  The example above has the unfortunate side effect of creating directories called foo.bak, which can be avoided by combining find with pax:

  { cd /source && find . -type f; } | \
  pax -rw -pp -s '/.*\.bak$//' -s '/$/.bak/' /target/
  

That's a typical job for cpio or pax:

find . -type f -mtime -14 -print0 | pax -0 -rw /ModifiedFiles

You could also use the -l option, to make links instead of copies. It doesn't work properly with the pax command on Debian, but maybe the one on OS/X doesn't have the same problem.

You can do something similar with cpio (an ancestor of pax), but the cpio implementation on OS/X doesn't seem to support a -0/--null option which would allow arbitrary file names. If you know your file names don't contain newline characters, you can still do:

find . -type f -mtime -14 | cpio -dp /ModifiedFiles

Both Debian (GNU) and OS/X versions of cpio also have a -l option to make links instead of copies. (and the one of Debian seems to work properly).