Returning to the shell-lesson-data directory,
cd ~/Desktop/shell-lesson-data/
In our thesis directory we have a file draft.txt
which isn’t a particularly informative name,
so let’s change the file’s name using mv,
which is short for ‘move’:
$ mv thesis/draft.txt thesis/quotes.txt
The first argument tells mv what we’re ‘moving’,
while the second is where it’s to go. In this case,
we’re moving thesis/draft.txt to thesis/quotes.txt,
which has the same effect as renaming the file.
Sure enough, ls shows us that thesis now contains one
file called quotes.txt:
$ ls thesis
quotes.txt
One must be careful when specifying the target file name, since mv will
silently overwrite any existing file with the same name, which could
lead to data loss. An additional option, mv -i (or mv --interactive),
can be used to make mv ask you for confirmation before overwriting.
Note that mv also works on directories.
Let’s move quotes.txt into the current working directory.
We use mv once again, but this time we’ll use just the name
of a directory as the second argument to tell mv that we want
to keep the filename but put the file somewhere new. (This is why the
command is called ‘move’.) In this case, the directory name we use is the
special directory name. that we mentioned earlier.
$ mv thesis/quotes.txt .
The effect is to move the file from the directory it was in to the current working directory.
ls now shows us that thesis is empty:
$ ls thesis
$
Alternatively, we can confirm the file quotes.txt is no longer present in the thesis directory
by explicitly trying to list it:
$ ls thesis/quotes.txt
ls: cannot access 'thesis/quotes.txt': No such file or directory
ls with a filename or directory as an argument only lists the requested file or directory.
If the file given as the argument doesn’t exist, the shell returns an error as we saw above.
We can use this to see that quotes.txt is now present in our current directory:
$ ls quotes.txt
quotes.txt
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