UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

Im trying to do move a file like this as mart of my script on Solaris

mv /path/to/file/file.txt ..
mv: cannot rename /path/to/file/file.txt to ../file.txt: Permission denied.

Im just trying to move it up one level using the following command on a bunch of directories:
find /path/to/file/ -type f -exec echo mv {} .. \;

Could someone answer this question, I have a very distinct feeling its very easy question, im just a bit on the dumb side sometimes

.. is not relative to the file, .. is relative to the current folder. So it tries to move the file from wherever it is, one up from the current folder.

If you're sitting in /home/username, it'd try and move /home/username/whatever/myfile to /home/username/../myfile, and since you don't have permission to write to /home, you get permission denied...

Is there anyway to specific this as relative to the file? I will be running this script in one parent directory that contains multiple different folder names in it

Well, the method I just suggested should work. /absolute/path/../filename looks a little odd, but will work.

Code:

# SAve to temporary file, so contents of directories don't change while find is running.
find ~/ -type f > /tmp/$$
awk -F"/" -v OFS="/" '{F=$0 ; $NF="../"$NF; print F" "$0 }' /tmp/$$ |
while read ORIG NEW
do
      echo mv "$ORIG" "$NEW"
done

rm -f /tmp/$$

Remove the 'echo' once you're sure it does what you want.

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