How do I move files and directories to the parent folder in Linux?

Question

In Linux (Ubuntu), how do you move all the files and directories to the parent directory?

Answer 1

find . -maxdepth 1 -exec mv {} .. \;

this will move hidden files as well.

You will get the message:

mv: cannot move `.' to `../.': Device or resource busy

when it tries to move . (current directory) but that won't cause any harm.

Answer 2

I came here because I'm new to this subject as well. For some reason the above didn't do the trick for me. What I did to move all files from a dir to its parent dir was:

cd to/the/dir
mv * ../

Answer 3

Type this in the shell:

mv *.* ..

That moves ALL the files one level up.

The character * is a wildcard. So *.deb will move all the .deb files, and for example Zeitgeist.* will move Zeitgeist.avi and Zeitgeist.srt one folder up.

And, of course, .. indicates the parent directory.

Answer 4

Assuming all your hidden files begin with dot followed by a letter or a number (which they should), you could use

mv * .[A-Za-z0-9]* ..

The .[A-Za-z0-9]* part is to make sure you don't try to move . or .. along, which would fail.

Answer 5

In bash you can use shopt -s dotglob to make * match all files and move them simply by

shopt -s dotglob; mv * ..

This is not the best solution since the setting is permanent for the shell until you change it by

shopt -u dotglob

but I think it's good to know.

Answer 6

It's simple to move all files and folders to the parent directory in Linux.

Go to that folder and use this command:

mv * /the full path

For example, if your files and folders are as follows:

/home/abcuser/test/1.txt 
                   2.txt
                   3.jpg
                   4.php
                   1folder
                   2folder

Go to that folder via cd:

cd /home/abcuser/test
mv * /home/abcuser

All your files and folders will move to the abcuser folder (parent directory).

Answer 7

A method which causes no errors and works every time:

ls -1A . | while read -r file                                                    
do                                                                                  
    mv "./${file}" ..                                                            
done