OS X (Apple)

Ok well assuming you want to move the contents of every folder on your desktop to the actual desktop you could do:

Code:

cd ~/Desktop && ls -l |awk '$0 ~ /'^d'/ {print $9}'|while read dir;do cd "$dir" && mv * ~/Desktop && cd ~/Desktop ;done

That Should work, but test it first if you are able.

In the for loop, the i represents a variable that expands to the item found on each respective iteration of the loop, so basically for i in ~/Downloads means that $i represents each individual item in the Downloads folder, for each pass through the loop it goes down the list of every item in that folder. the i can be anything, it is just a variable name.

---------- Post updated 05-15-12 at 11:26 AM ---------- Previous update was 05-14-12 at 10:02 PM ----------

Actually that code will fail if there are spaces in the folder names on your desktop. Try this instead:

Code:

cd ~/Desktop && ls -l |awk '$0 ~ /'^d'/ {$1=$2=$3=$4=$5=$6=$7=$8="" ; print $0 }'|while read dir;do cd "$dir" && mv * ~/Desktop && cd ~/Desktop ;done

My suggestion was very minimal because you gave very few details.

If it didn't work, in what way did it not work?

And please give more details.

Corona688,
I believe he wanted to loop through every directory on his desktop and move the contents of each directly to his desktop. Your solution would definitely work to move the contents of a folder named folder to the desktop, he must have typed the code exactly as you wrote it, not replacing the work folder for his own directory.

Wow Glev. Absolutely outstanding!

Corona thanks as well. After playing around with your code I was able to make your option work as well!

Thank you so much for the help. Any recommendations on books to learn shell scripting? My college doesn't offer classes on it

Thanks again!