UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have in root directory a folder A and a Folder B. I want to copy or move all content (many files) from A to B.

How do I do that UNIX style?

Thanks!

Unless you have a quite enormous number of files sitting right inside /a, this is it:

Code:

mv /a/* /b/

That's what I had in mind, but just wanted to be sure so no messing up And well there are a lot of files to be moved. Does that make any difference?

If you want to copy or move everything on the directory, run cp or mv on the directory, not on the contents.

Code:

cp -rv a b

or

Code:

mv a b

if you would like to see a 'progress' status and rsync is available

Code:

rsync -rvP a/ b

Ok I try that one and hope I get it right. Maybe it's about 50.000 files.

What matters are how many entries are in a, not how much stuff there is in general.

for example, if /a contained these files:

Code:

f00000000
f00000001
...
f9999999

the shell would try and turn /a/* into /a/f0000000 /a/f0000001 ... /a/f9999999 and run out of space in the commandline. Many systems will let you cram in a few hundred filenames, but not thousands or billions.

But a folder inside a is no problem since /a/* just becomes /a/foldername. It doesn't have to cram one million filenames into the list, and the rest becomes mv's job, which it'll do fine.

How big this limit is varies from system to system, but if it's not thousands, you're probably okay.

[edit] 50,000? Yeah, rmt's method works better. I just usually don't like it since, if /b doesn't exist, mv will rename /a into /b instead!

Thanks guys. I did the command and that worked fine. Now I wonder what is the command for decompress a .bzip2 file? I first .tar the file and then made it .bzip2 and will now upload it to the server and need to decompress. How?

Another short question: When I log in to the server from SSH I don't come to the root catalog. Is there any smarter/faster way the printing cd ../../../../ ?

Thanks for all the help!