Possible Duplicate:
Can I keep . and .. out of .* expansion?
I know about
mv * ~/whatever
mv .* ~/whatever
but that tries to move . and .., which just caused me a bunch of pain. Is there a way to mv all the files, including the .* files, but exclude the current directory and it's parent?
From the Bash manual, shopt section:
dotglob If set, bash includes filenames beginning with a `.' in the results
of pathname expansion.
shopt can be used to set certain "shell options" as explained in the manual. See man bash.
Thus
shopt -s dotglob
mv * ~/whatever
does what you want. Test it with e.g.
shopt -s dotglob
ls -d *
to see which files are matched.
Since it is the de facto Bash way as per the manual, no hidden surprises should turn up regarding files with tricky names. If it does, it is by definition a bug in Bash.
Just tell bash there is the second character and it is not a dot. Will not move files named like ..file, though.
mv .[^.]* somewhere/
Try this:
mv .[a-zA-Z0-9]* ~/whatever
Unless you have dot files that start with ._ or other non-alphanumeric characters, it should get them all.
If you don't want to move directories, this will move all files to ./foo/:
$ find . -type f | while read n; do mv "$n" foo/; done
If you do need to do directories also, try:
$ find . | grep -vP '^\.$' | while read n; do mv "$n" foo/; done
Use find which excludes . and ..:
find . -name ".*" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1
and check the result. To move the files
find . -name ".*" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec mv {} ~/whatever \;
