Moving or renaming a file

You can use the mv command to move or rename a file. The format for this command is

mv file1 file2

where
file1 is the name (and path, if necessary) of the file that will be moved
file2 is either the new location or new name of file1.

The DOS equivalent of this command is ren or rename.

To minimize the need to move a file around, save it directly from the program that created it (e.g., a word processor) into an appropriate directory. An easy and foolproof way to do this is to always specify the complete path from your home directory.

For example, to save a file named phonelist into your home directory, save it as
~/phonelist.

To save a document named essay.doc into your biology subdirectory in your home directory, save it as
~/biology/essay.doc .

Here are some examples of files being moved:

mv letter.txt proposal.txt
"letter.txt" is renamed "proposal.txt" and remains in the current directory.

mv proposal.txt work/
"proposal.txt" is moved from the current directory to the "work" directory.

You can indicate directory paths using the following abbreviations:

.	current directory
..	parent (previous) directory
~	home directory

For example, entering mv work/proposal.txt ./letter will rename "proposal.txt" to "letter" and move it from the "work" directory to the current directory.

Entering mv work/proposal.txt ../proposal.txt will move the file "proposal.txt" from the "work" directory to its parent directory.

Likewise, entering mv work/letter.txt ~/letter.txt will move the file "letter.txt" from the "work" directory to the home directory of the user.

Last modified July 20, 2004 by cawalker