next up previous contents
Next: The X Window Up: Moving Information Previous: Pruning Back with

A Forklift Can Be Very Handy

 

Finally, the other file command you should be aware of is mv. mv looks a lot like cp, except that it deletes the original file after copying it. Thus, it's a lot like using cp and rm together. Let's take a look at what we can do:

As you can see, mv will rename a file if the second parameter is a file. If the second parameter is a directory, mv will move the file to the new directory, keeping it's shortname the same:

mv old-name new-name
mv file1 file2 ... fileN new-directory

You should be very careful with mv---it doesn't check to see if the file already exists, and will remove any old file in its way. For instance, if I had a file named frog already in my directory report, the command mv frog report would delete the file /report/frog and replace it with /frog.

In fact, there is one way to make rm, cp and mv ask you before deleting files. The -i option. If you use an alias, you can make the shell do rm -i automatically when you type rm. You'll learn more about this later.

 



Ross Biro
Thu May 25 10:45:54 PDT 1995