File operations, moving folders, I think I deleted everything.

current working directory is

I meant to put the '&' at the very end of the statement but notice the '*' at the very end of the mv. Can you tell me something about this? Besides that I may be a complete moron.

In /archive/personal was the destination folder (photos) and about 7 other subdirectories

Thanks for your help.

Nevermind, too cautious. It just put them in the last directory in the cwd. GREAT!!

Hello hyphenated
I think you was not too cautious seeing the * character at the end of the command, especially under root login.
In Linux this character is rather powerful because it means 'everything accessible' in the present directory, and it is so replaced by all that is present in the current directory.
I think that it was not what you wanted with the command, if you wanted only to move some files in the photos directory (which you say was the destination directory of the mv command).
So you should not have used the * at the end, which can be dangerous if not your real choice.
I think it is more safer in this case to explicitly write the destination folder at the end, without using the * character.
Use it only if it is really necessary and cautiously.

Greetings.

The command line is interpreted by bash unless the specific command supports regular expressions. At that point you need to quote them so that bash doesn't interpret them.

You should be able to do 'mv *' safely in any directory. If the out put of 'ls' does not output a directory last, then you will probably get the error "mv: target 'last file' is not a directory". If it is a directory, then all the files will go there.

You can do 'mv * anydir' and you will get the error "mv: cannot move 'anydir' to a sub-directory of itself, 'anydir/anydir' but all the other files and folders will go into anydir with no problem.

But anything that spits out warnings probably isn't a good command to be doing best not to be lazy about it.