Recursive move utility on Unix?

Question

Sometimes I have two trees that used to have the same content, but have grown out of sync (because I moved disks around or whatever). A good example is a tree where I mirror upstream packages from Fedora.

I want to merge those two trees again by moving all of the files from tree1 into tree2.

Usually I do this with:

rsync -arv tree1/* tree2

Then delete tree1.

However, this takes an awful lot of time and disk space, and it would be much easier to be able to do:

mv -r tree1/* tree2

In other words, a recursive move. It would be faster because first of all it would not even copy, just move the inodes, and second I wouldn't need a delete at the end.

Does this exist ?

As a test case, consider the following sequence of commands:

$ mkdir -p a/b
$ touch a/b/c1
$ rsync -arv a/ a2
sending incremental file list
created directory
./
b/
b/c1
b/c2

sent 173 bytes  received 57 bytes  460.00 bytes/sec
total size is 0  speedup is 0.00
$ touch a/b/c2

What command would now have the effect of moving a/b/c2 to a2/b/c2 and then deleting the a subtree (since everything in it is already in the destination tree) ?

Answer 1

Per the mv(1) manpage from gnu's mv:

-u, --update move only when the SOURCE file is newer than the destination file or when the destination file is missing

Answer 2

the proposed mv -uf dir1/* dir2/ move the (sub)directories, not each file. you might try to use find

cd dir1
find . -type d -exec mkdir -p dir2/"{}" \;
find . -type f -exec mv -uf "{}" dir2/"{}" \;

or something similar

Answer 3

Does not

mv -uf tree1/* tree2/

work?

Answer 4

Midnight Commander (mc) is also nice for this kind of stuff. Tag files with CTRL-t, press F6, and when it asks to overwrite destination files, choose Update if you want to overwrite older files.

Answer 5

You could use "cp -l & rm" for in-device moving:

cp -alv --backup=numbered tree1/* tree2 &&
rm -rf tree1/

• -l of cp to use hard links instead of copying, (this also prevents cross-device operations)
• --backup=numbered of cp for backing up the existing files in target directory

And be careful about this two issues:

• use && to prevent your uncopied data to be removed, if you accidentally run it on cross-device targets. (in corss-device case cp exits with a status of "1", at least for GNU coreutils)
• files starting with "." in tree1, you will lost them if there is any.

Answer 6

err

mv dir1/* dir2/

or simply

rsync -arv --remove-source-files  tree1/* tree2

should be enough, you will probably run into trouble at some point when too many entries are in dir1.

find sourcedir -maxdepth 1 -exec echo mv {} targetdir/ \;

should be a nice options

find sourcedir -maxdepth 1 -print0 |xargs -0 -I _ echo mv _ targetdir
find sourcedir -maxdepth1 -exec mv {} targetdir/ +

are both not really necessary because mv just takes 2 options (source target), so you will have to live with the multitude of processes in that case.

Answer 7

cd /tree1
mv * /tree2

This won't move hidden files or folders, but your original example wouldn't either.

Answer 8

switch to directory you want to move and do

tar cf - * | ( cd /target; tar xfp -)

Quicker than mv...