Hello,

I have to move all files, except one, from one directory to another. I tried it with mv and find:

mv -f $(find $SOURCE -maxdepth 1 ! -name "FileNotToMove") $TARGET

It nearly worked out, but unfortunately not only the content of the $SOURCE directory got moved, but also the directory itself. I am just a beginner and don't have any ideas left how to do it in a proper way.

There is one problem with this - if the number of files you find is huge or if the files have spaces in the names you will get problems. If you exceed ARG_MAX (max number of bytes as an argument) you will get an error. If the file has a space in the filename mv will think it is two different files.

Ok, so I cannot use this variation. Is there an other way to do it, without using for or while and comparing each filename?

i think you could use :

find $SOURCE -type f ! -name "FileNotToMove" -exec mv {} $TARGET \;

You will not have the ARG_MAX problem.

Hope it helps

Olivier

bash:
ksh:

zsh:

the same as bash, only change shopt ... to setopt kshglob