'mv' equivalent of drag and drop with replace?

Question

In a GUI environment, a drag-and-drop with replace will replace files and entire directories (including contents) with whatever is being copied in. Is there a way to accomplish this same intuitive result with the 'mv' command?

Answer 1

Not with mv.

The core function of mv (despite its name) is to rename an object. One of the guarantees that UNIX makes is that renames are atomic -- you're never allowed to see a partially completed rename. This guarantee can be very useful if you want to change a file (/etc/passwd, for example) that other programs may be looking at, and you want them to see either the old or new version of the file, and no other possibility. But a "recursive rename" like you describe would break that guarantee -- you could stop it in the middle and you'd have a half-moved tree and probably a mess -- and so it doesn't really fit in with the philosophy of mv. That's my guess as to why mv -r doesn't exist.

(Never mind that mv breaks that philosophy in other, smaller ways. For example, mv actually does a cp followed by rm when moving files from one filesystem to another.)

Enough philosophy. If you want to recursively move ("drag-drop") a tree from one place to another on the same filesystem, you can get the efficiency and speed of mv as follows (for example):

cp -al source/* dest/ && rm -r source/*

The -l flag to cp means "create a hard link instead of copying" -- it's effectively creating a new filename that points to the same file data as the old filename. This only works on filesystems that support hard links, though -- so any native UNIX-ish filesystem is fine, but it won't work with FAT.

The && means "only run the following command if the preceding command succeeded". If you like, you can run the two commands one at a time instead.

Answer 2

mv -f /path/to/source/folder/* /destination/folder/

Will move everything in /path/to/source/folder, including files and directories to /destination/folder.

And will overwrite existing files and directories.

Answer 3

I don't think you can replicate the drag-drop behavior you're describing with mv, as non-empty subdirectories in the target won't be replaced.

Perhaps rsync? Something like rsync -a -r source/ target/? Run with the -v -n to do a verbose dry-run first to make sure it does what you want.

Answer 4

You're probably going to want to change the correct answer to this:

https://github.com/iaindooley/pickdrop

Example:

say I have:

test/
test/index.php
test/images/
test/images/a.jpg
test/images/thing.png

and I want to move these things to /site

so it looks like:

site/
site/public/
site/public/index.php
site/public/a.jpg
site/public/thing.png

I can go:

cd images &&
pick a.jpg thing.png
cd .. &&
pick index.php &&
cd .. &&
mkdir site &&
mkdir site/public &&
cd site/public &&
drop

This is literally cut & paste.