How do I move files and directories to the parent folder in Linux?

Question

In Linux (Ubuntu), how do you move all the files and directories to the parent directory?

Answer 1

find . -maxdepth 1 -exec mv {} .. \;

this will move hidden files as well.

You will get the message:

mv: cannot move `.' to `../.': Device or resource busy

when it tries to move . (current directory) but that won't cause any harm.

Answer 2

I came here because I'm new to this subject as well. For some reason the above didn't do the trick for me. What I did to move all files from a dir to its parent dir was:

cd to/the/dir
mv * ../

Answer 3

Type this in the shell:

mv *.* ..

That moves ALL the files one level up.

The character * is a wildcard. So *.deb will move all the .deb files, and Zeitgeist.* will move Zeitgeist.avi and Zeitgeist.srt one folder up, since, of course, .. indicates the parent directory.

To move everything including folders, etc, just use * instead of *.*

Answer 4

It can't be more simple than:

mv * ../

To also move hidden files:

mv /path/subfolder/{.,}* /path/ 

mv is a command to move files, * means all files and folders and ../ is the path to the parent directory.

Answer 5

In bash you can use shopt -s dotglob to make * match all files and move them simply by

shopt -s dotglob; mv * ..

This is not the best solution since the setting is permanent for the shell until you change it by

shopt -u dotglob

but I think it's good to know.

Answer 6

A method which causes no errors and works every time:

ls -1A . | while read -r file                                                    
do                                                                                  
    mv "./${file}" ..                                                            
done

Answer 7

find . -maxdepth 2 -type f -exec mv {} .. \;

I used a variation of above to move all the files from subfolders into the parent.

I'd got data in folders by year, but found by using metadata I could have them all in the same folder which made it easier to manage.

eg.

/data/2001/file_1
/data/2002/file_2
/data/2003/file_3

Answer 8

There is no need to change directories. Just include * at the end of path:

mv /my/folder/child/* /my/folder/

Above only moves non hidden files. To move only hidden files use .*

mv /my/folder/child/.* /my/folder/

Above two can be combined in to one command:

mv /my/folder/child/{.,}* /my/folder/

Also see: How to move all files including hidden files into parent directory via *

Answer 9

find -type f|while read line; do mv $line ${line##*/}; done

Answer 10

It's simple to move all files and folders to the parent directory in Linux.

Go to that folder and use this command:

mv * /the full path

For example, if your files and folders are as follows:

/home/abcuser/test/1.txt 
                   2.txt
                   3.jpg
                   4.php
                   1folder
                   2folder

Go to that folder via cd:

cd /home/abcuser/test
mv * /home/abcuser

All your files and folders will move to the abcuser folder (parent directory).

Answer 11

Assuming all your hidden files begin with dot followed by a letter or a number (which they should), you could use

mv * .[A-Za-z0-9]* ..

The .[A-Za-z0-9]* part is to make sure you don't try to move . or .. along, which would fail.

Answer 12

switch to sub directory and execute following command for copy or move files.

ex: a is parent directory and b is sub directory, we want to move/copy all files from b to a (sub directory to parent directory).

cd b
cp * ..
mv * ..