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Full Discussion: What's the reason behind having -n option for mv command?
Operating Systems OS X (Apple) What's the reason behind having -n option for mv command? Post 302967808 by bakunin on Sunday 28th of February 2016 04:29:41 PM
Old 02-28-2016
Quote:
Originally Posted by scrutinizerix
I still can not grasp benefits of using
Code:
mv -n source file target file

What's the point?
According to the man page of OS X i found in the net "-n" prevents the mv command to overwrite already existing files. That means: if you have files A, B and C and you do a

Code:
mv A D

you will end up with three files again, B, C and D (the former A). Whereas, when you issue:

Code:
mv A B

you will end up with only two files: B (the former A) and C. The original B will be wiped out. This may sometimes be the desired result, but sometimes it may not. To guard against accidentally wiping out a file you might want to keep is the reason "-n" exists.

I hope this helps.

bakunin
This User Gave Thanks to bakunin For This Post:
scrutinizerix
 

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

ohcount

OHCOUNT(1)							   User Commands							OHCOUNT(1)

NAME

       ohcount - manual page for ohcount 3.0.0

SYNOPSIS

       ohcount [option] [paths...]

DESCRIPTION

       Ohloh source code line counter command line tool.

	      http://www.ohloh.net/

   [option] can be one of the following:
       -a, --annotate

       -d, --detect

       -h, --help

       -i, --individual

       -l, --license

       -re

       -s, --summary

       -a, --annotate		       Show annotated source code

	      The  contents  of  all  source  code files found within the given paths will be emitted to stdout. Each line will be prefixed with a
	      tab-delimited language name and semantic categorization (code, comment, or blank).

       -d, --detect		       Find source code files

	      Recursively find all source code files within the given paths.  For each source code file found, the file name will  be  emitted	to
	      stdout prefixed with a tab-delimited language name.

       -h, --help		       Display this message

       -i, --individual 	       Count lines of code per file

	      Count  lines  in	all source code files within the given paths, and emit a report of the lines of code, comments, and blanks in each
	      language per file.

       -l, --license

	      Displays detected licensing information contained in each source code file.

       -re

	      Prints raw entity information to the screen (mainly for debugging).

       -s, --summary		       Count lines of code (default)

	      Count lines in all source code files within the given paths, and emit a report of the total number of lines of code,  comments,  and
	      blanks in each language. This is the default action.

       [paths] can refer to any number of individual files or directories.

	      Directories will be probed recursively. If no path is given, the current directory will be used.

ohcount 3.0.0							  September 2011							OHCOUNT(1)
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