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A Forklift Can Be Very Handy

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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:

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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.

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Converted on:
Mon Apr 1 08:59:56 EST 1996