Linux command line. Move all files and directories in directory, except some files and directories

Question

I have a folder A which has files and directories, I want to move all those files and directories to another folder B, except file, file2, directory, and directory2.

How can this be done?

Answer 1

With zsh:

setopt extendedglob # best in ~/.zshrc
mv A/^(file|directory)(|2)(D) B/

(the (D) to include dot (hidden) files).

With bash:

shopt -s extglob dotglob failglob
mv A/!(@(file|directory)?(2)) B/

With ksh93

(FIGNORE='@(.|..|@(file|directory)?(2))'; mv A/* B)

Answer 2

what i usually do

cd A
ls > a

(assuming you have no 'a' file).

vi a

remove whatever file or directory to be kept in place.

mv $(<a) B

Answer 3

You can use find with excluded expressions:

find . ! -name . -prune ! -path ./file \
                        ! -path ./file2 \
                        ! -path ./directory \
                        ! -path ./directory2 \
     -exec mv {} your_destination \;

This solution is inspired by this question.

Answer 4

ls | egrep -v '(file|file2|directory|directory2)' | xargs -i mv {} ../B/

Answer 5

If ./A and ./B are on the same filesystem and if these files do not already exist in ./B:

file file2 directory directory2

...then this operation should just be atomic:

cd ./A; mv * ../B
for mv in file file2 directory directory2
do mv ../B/"$mv" .
done

If they are not, then there are at least 8 additional cross-device copies done with the above set of commands.

Answer 6

$ sudo mv (source folder name) A B(destination foldername)

ex: create empty dir some sub folder a 1)sudo mkdir -p A/{b/{a,b,c},c,d}

2)ls A/

b c d

3) sudo mkdir B

5)sudo mv a(folder) b(folder)

Answer 7

You could use a bash array to store which ones you want to skip and then use the containsElement function demonstrated here:

$ skiplist=(file file2 directory directory2)
$ for f in *; do if containsElement "$f" "${skiplist[@]}"; then continue; fi;
mv -v "$f" B; done