#mv /abc/* /xyz
0403-027 The parameter list is too long
this messages is given when i try to move or copy the cpntent of the directory but
#mv /abc/ /xyz/
this works
but i want to move the contents of /abc directory

If you want to move the contents, then you should go:
The first line you provided doesn't work, because not having a trailing slash ("/xyz" as opposed to "/xyz/") means you are trying to move all of the files in /abc and rename them to /xyz; keep in mind Linux and UNIX have never had a "rename" command - to rename things you "mv" them.

The second line should only give you the desired result if you provide a trailing asterisk "*" from the source - as I provided in my example - so you're moving all of the second-level ("/abc/*" = top level, "/abc/*" = second level) items into the destination directory. Your "mv" command is working.

Uhh, nonsense. Doing a 'mv /abc/* /xyz' is fine. The problem is the shell expansion is creating a command line that's too long for his shell (or maybe the mv command).

Try 'for go in /abc/*; do mv $go /xyz; done' assuming you're using ksh or another bourne type shell.

Dave

This may take ages given the machine has to spawn a new instance of mv for every file (and this will be a lot, given the original error message). find can do this in combination with xargs a lot more quickly, or indeed on its own:Having the \+ at the end of the find command makes is save a number of input files in a queue, and then batch process them; the alternative (\;) spawns a new instance of rm for each file, which is probably no improvement over the for-loop method.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xargs for more examples.

Almost. 'find' finds the containing directory first, so you'll end up with /xyz/abc in the first operation, then a load of 'file not found's.

Might get away with a 'find -depth /abc -exec mv "{}" /xyz \+' though.

Dave

Ah, yes, I hadn't thought of that.

Every day's a school day

the problem is the parameter nargs on your box
with your command you take all args after your mv.
I think you have many files in this directory

try this command lsattr -El sys0 and view nagrs's parameters
You must increase this value

Another trick is to notice that will often work:

mv /abc/* /xyz

actually turns into

mv /abc/x /abc/y /abc/z ...

Notice that the string "/abc/" is used over and over again. By cd'ing into the directory, you can reduce the arg length because * will then expand into only the contents of the directory:

cd /abc
mv * /xyz

This won't work of course if the expansion of * still exceeds the limit. Then find is easiest.

you can use xargs along with mv.

Alas, unfortunately, not with BSD mv, which lacks the ability to specify the target directory via -t. That is a nice, missing feature.