How to move all files plus hidden to folder down?

Question

I want to move all my drupal files in www folder to html folder. I don't know how to do this in terminal and I'm not sure if all folder and files including hidden ones are drupal in the www folder, is there a way of checking the lesser obvious ones or would www have been empty before and any hidden files will auto recreate?

Answer 1

With zsh:

mv -- *(D) html

mv will complain that it can't move html to itself, but will still move the rest.

With bash:

shopt -s dotglob
mv -- * html

With ksh93:

FIGNORE='@(.|..)'
mv -- * html

POSIXly:

mv -- * .??* .[!.] html

or

mv -- * .[!.]* ..?* html

(you're likely to get errors for those of the patterns that have no match. That should be harmless but will still cause the exit status to be non-zero so in script you would not be able to distinguish that with a failure to move files).

Answer 2

The easy way:

# from the www directory
cd ..
mv www html
mkdir www
mv html www/

This assumes you don't already have a html directory at the same level as www. If you do, pick a different name:

cd ..
mv www temp_name
mkdir www
mv temp_name www/html

Answer 3

A naive option (don't try it!) would be: mv * .* html - this will however try to move . and .. too, which is not quite what you want. I usually do something like mv * .??* html - this moves normal file and hidden files with names that have at least 3 characters in them, effectively skipping . and ..