Hi,

Not a newbie actually, but I have a very newbie-ish question.

I have two existing directories, test1 and test2. I wish to rename test1 to test2 with bash, and overwrite test2. I can't find out how to do it!

mv test1 test2
This moves test1 INTO test2. And so does every other variation I can think of. Googling for "move rename directory bash linux" etc brings up thousands of helpful pages, but all I have read assume that test2 does not exist.

I can do it in two steps of course (rm -Rf test2; mv test1 test2) but I am wondering if it can be done in one step.

Greatful for any help.

In unix (and linux as well) you generally have small tools that do simple jobs and do them well.
These are rm and mv. There is no "rename to overwrite existing" tool. If you really need it, create a script for it.

Was searching the internet myself until figured it out myself.

to move directory contents use command
mv sourceDirectory\* destinationDirectory\

to overwrite add the " -f"

A little late but better than never

Just came across the same issue.

A quick look into the man pages yields
which is exactly what we need here, i.e., "mv -T test1 test2" should do the job.

@r0b0: your statement is correct, though not terribly helpful. In fact, the little helpers also come with command line switches!

@Breakable: The '-f' (to force) does not seem to change the 'move-into' versus 'overwrite' behaviour. Also note that Unix/Linux use the regular slash rather than backslash, which would escape the "*" in this case.

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!

I don't think you should expect a reply. Look at the thread dates. Resurrecting a six year old thread??

thanks for providing your solution. i did a quick google search and found this resurrected thread.

@onebuck surprise!!!!!!!!!!

This thread may be almost 7 years old now, but there is still no clear answer.

What I found on my system ( $ mv --version : mv (GNU coreutils) 8.5) ) is that

• if the destination doesn't exist, mv does a rename
• if the destination exists, the source gets moved into it.

Here is some more testing:
What about the "rename" Perl script which comes with Debian?

Hi.

Maybe this could help

Cheers

Complete Newbie, but I was playing with this problem and came up with the same solution as okomba. To overwrite the destination directory I found I had to delete it first. So I have a script which looks like this.

Since we are no longer overwriting anything the -f is not needed, and actually I found -r was adequate.

Your solution is wacky and won't work. You've got backslashes on the end of two lines, which would mean that your code is equivalent to:

rm -R test2cp -R test1\* test2rm -R test1

I'm not really sure what that command would do, but I bet it's not what you want.

Sorry, I actually have forward slashes in my script and they do work. Copied this from the previous entry.

If you have slashes instead of backslashes, that makes a big difference. You should still be careful though. If you make a mistake and call the script with the wrong arguments, you might delete something you didn't mean to.

Imagine what will happen if the result of calling your script is the following command. Just imagine it, don't try it!!

# rm -r / # don't run this command!

That could possibly happen if your script has some slight problems or if you aren't very careful with how you call it.

I've been wondering on how to do this aswel and the only working solution for my problem is to make a symlink to the directory that want to use the files from.

So instead of move/renaming a directory into another just make the symlink point to the new source.

Starting point:
dir1/file1
dir2/file2

Create the 'final' point where the files are in that are needed:
ln dir2 final -s

Now switch directory content:
ln dir1 final -sTf

This way you never have a missing directory and the switch is instantaneous.
Not sure if this was your goal aswel, but I'm working on a seemless checkout system on a heavily used directory structure.
The only downside is that you can't easily tell (without commands) what directory the 'final' is pointing at..
A solution would be deleting the directory that was previously linked after switching the link.

So make that an 8 year topic, still relevant.

You need a forward slash instead a backward one and the pipe isn't required.
You were one the right track! The semicolon is there to let BASH know the first command sequence is done and a new one begins. Substituting the "cp" command with the "mv" command isn't necessary, just an alternative showing what else is possible.

My ubuntu's man page for mv doesn't mention -r (but cp's does) ... perhaps stick with cp, not the mv alternative!

So, after 8 years, perhaps try