How do I move files and directories to the parent folder in Linux?

Question

In Linux (Ubuntu), how do you move all the files and directories to the parent directory?

• DJCrashdummy: the question with by far the most complete answer i found: unix.stackexchange.com/q/6393/93768

Answer 1

find . -maxdepth 1 -exec mv {} .. \;

this will move hidden files as well.

You will get the message:

mv: cannot move `.' to `../.': Device or resource busy

when it tries to move . (current directory) but that won't cause any harm.

• raphink: It will move all files from all subdirectories to the parent of the current directory, too. I'd use -maxdepth 1 to be sure.
• nekbaba: Now it says: mv: cannot move ./scripts' to ../scripts': Directory not empty
• raphink: You must have a directory called scripts in your parent directory AND in your current directory. You will have to rename this one before you move it.
• crafter: It worked but you left one one very important bit of information - you must run this from the subdirectory. Also this will not delete the subdirectory itself so you must back up one directory and do a rmdir on the subdirectory.
• Adam Ryczkowski: I found this superior: find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec mv -t .. -- {} + (taken from unix.stackexchange.com/q/6393/93768). No error messages and actually working in my bash script.

Answer 2

I came here because I'm new to this subject as well. For some reason the above didn't do the trick for me. What I did to move all files from a dir to its parent dir was:

cd to/the/dir
mv * ../

• Wavesailor: This does not move hidden file though
• Gelldur: 1 liner: (cd ${ANDROID_NDK_HOME}/android-ndk-r14b/ && mv * ../)
• Lily: you save my day.Thanks
• Basilevs: This will break on large file sets due to command line limitations

Answer 3

It can't be more simple than:

mv * ../

To also move hidden files:

mv /path/subfolder/{.,}* /path/ 

mv is a command to move files, * means all files and folders and ../ is the path to the parent directory.

Answer 4

Type this in the shell:

mv *.* ..

That moves ALL the files one level up.

The character * is a wildcard. So *.deb will move all the .deb files, and Zeitgeist.* will move Zeitgeist.avi and Zeitgeist.srt one folder up, since, of course, .. indicates the parent directory.

To move everything including folders, etc, just use * instead of *.*

• nekbaba: this didn't work with the dirs! or the hidden files
• maaartinus: It works with dirs, at least for me.
• Chris S: You want * not *.* to include directories
• BlackBurn027: Its a nice documentary
• Martin Thoma: zsh: argument list too long: mv; bash: /usr/bin/mv: Argument list too long. Aparently it doesn't work for 80k files

Answer 5

There is no need to change directories. Just include * at the end of path:

mv /my/folder/child/* /my/folder/

Above only moves non hidden files. To move only hidden files use .*

mv /my/folder/child/.* /my/folder/

Above two can be combined in to one command:

mv /my/folder/child/{.,}* /my/folder/

Also see: How to move all files including hidden files into parent directory via *

Answer 6

Assuming all your hidden files begin with dot followed by a letter or a number (which they should), you could use

mv * .[A-Za-z0-9]* ..

The .[A-Za-z0-9]* part is to make sure you don't try to move . or .. along, which would fail.

Answer 7

In bash you can use shopt -s dotglob to make * match all files and move them simply by

shopt -s dotglob; mv * ..

This is not the best solution since the setting is permanent for the shell until you change it by

shopt -u dotglob

but I think it's good to know.

• Martin Ueding: Call it in a subshell: (shopt -s dotglob && mv * ..). That way, the option is only local to that subshell.
• Daniel Howard: Good answer - it's simple, includes hidden files and doesn't cause an error about copying '.' and '..'

Answer 8

As outlined by others, mv * ../ is the most straight forward way to copy all files from a sub directory to its parent directory.

However, if the list of files to copy is very large, you may run into this error:

-bash: /bin/mv: Argument list too long (see this article for more info).

Then you can use the other suggestion:

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec mv {} .. \;

Note the addition of -mindepth 1. Then the warning "mv: cannot move .' to ../.': Device or resource busy" does not appear because the current directory is not included.

Note: you have to execute these commands from the sub directory.

Answer 9

A method which causes no errors and works every time:

ls -1A . | while read -r file 
do 
 mv "./${file}" .. 
done

Answer 10

find . -maxdepth 2 -type f -exec mv {} .. \;

I used a variation of above to move all the files from subfolders into the parent.

I'd got data in folders by year, but found by using metadata I could have them all in the same folder which made it easier to manage.

eg.

/data/2001/file_1
/data/2002/file_2
/data/2003/file_3

Answer 11

It's simple to move all files and folders to the parent directory in Linux.

Go to that folder and use this command:

mv * /the full path

For example, if your files and folders are as follows:

/home/abcuser/test/1.txt 
 2.txt
 3.jpg
 4.php
 1folder
 2folder

Go to that folder via cd:

cd /home/abcuser/test
mv * /home/abcuser

All your files and folders will move to the abcuser folder (parent directory).

• slhck: Thanks @Gareth, was about to the same. Abhishek, please don't post any unrelated links, where's the sense in that? Also, check your formatting please. Additionally, /the full path does not work in Linux, you have to escape spaces with /the\ full\ path.

Answer 12

find -type f|while read line; do mv $line ${line##*/}; done

• Scott - Слава Україні: Thanks for contributing an answer. While this might work in simple scenarios, piping find into while read is a bad way to use find, and better answers have already been posted.

Answer 13

There's a lot of answers to this question, which proves the flexibility of Bash commands. However, to me a very simply solution that does the trick nicely is this one:

mv * .[^.]* .??* ..

mv move; * select all files and folders; .[^.]* collects up the hidden files, with one dot at the start of their name; .??* will select files that start with two dots followed by other characters; .. is the destination, which in this case is the parent folder.

Note, using .[^.]* and .??* will ensure you only select those files with a single dot followed by something other than a dot, and those with two dots followed by other characters.

If you'd like to avoid trying to remember this, I suggest setting up an alias, such as, alias mvallup="mv * .[^.]* .??* ..". Add this to ~/.bash_aliases. Now you can just type mvallup and it's a done deal.

A shorter version of this was suggested by William Edwards, but it didn't include hidden files. He gave an example for also moving hidden files, but that was not exampled as simply as it could have been (mv /path/subfolder/{.,}* /path/) hence why I'm posting this very simple option.

Answer 14

One liner to combine find and mv

Find folder in which we are interested see find

For each such folder we execute:

echo "Moving $found_folder" # Just print
(cd "$found_folder" && mv * ../); # enter dir AND move content to parent
rmdir "$found_folder" # remove dir, this will be done only when dir is empty so nice check is everything fine

for found_folder in $(find . -type d -wholename '*/config/my_catchy_name'); do echo "Moving $found_folder"; (cd "$found_folder" && mv * ../); rmdir "$found_folder"; done;

• Moves sub dirs (when destination doesn't have already such dirs)
• Moves hidden files
• Moves symbolic links without making mess

Answer 15

Simple and memorisable:

mv ./{.,}* ..

Answer 16

switch to sub directory and execute following command for copy or move files.

ex: a is parent directory and b is sub directory, we want to move/copy all files from b to a (sub directory to parent directory).

cd b
cp * ..
mv * ..

• DavidPostill: Welcome to Super User! This duplicates another answer and adds no new content. Please don't post an answer unless you actually have something new to contribute.