make an alias to move files to a tmp directory

Question

I am trying to create an alias to move files and directories to the tmp directory. This is what I've tried:

alias rm='/bin/mv *.* /tmp'

The problem is that when I type rm filename, I get an error saying:

/bin/mv: target 'filename' is not a directory.

I know that filename is just a file. The point is that I want to move it to the specified /tmp directory. Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

alias rm='mv -t /tmp ' 

using GNU Collection mv 8.13 on Ubuntu 12.04. Note the space after /tmp.

Answer 2

Your alias means that when you type 'rm filename' you are really running this command:

/bin/mv *.* /tmp filename

That's obviously not what you want. I don't think you can use an alias for this, because I don't think there's a way to re-order the arguments passed to an alias. You'll be better off writing a short shell script that looks something like this:

#!/bin/sh
mv "$@" /tmp

Note: You don't want *.* either, that looks like a Windowsism... that will only match filenames with periods in them. Many file names in Linux don't contain periods.