Help Topic: Renaming and Copying Files

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Moving/Renaming and Copying Files on the Command Line

Moving (renaming) and copying files and directories are done on the command line using the mv (move) command and the cp (copy) command.

Moving and Renaming a file with the mv command    [top]

The jobs of moving and renaming files are both handled by the mv command. In the simplest case for example, file1 can be renamed to file file2 like this: 

  $ ls
  file1
  $ mv file1 file2
  $ ls
  file2

The mv command may also be used to move one or many files into a directory: 

  $ ls -F
  file1   file2   file3   file4   file5   project/ 
  $ mv file* project
  $ ls -F
  project/
  $ ls project
  file1   file2   file3   file4   file5

If you try to move a file into a directory that doesn't exist you will get an error. 

  $ ls -F
  file1   project/ 
  $ mv file1 project23/
  mv: rename file1 to project23/: No such file or directory

By default the mv command will let you rename one file to another, even if the target file already exists. Most people find this a bit unsettling to allow this without prompting for confirmation of intention. If the mv command is used with the -i option, the user will indeed be prompted for confirmation if the target file already exists. For this reason most people employ an alias for the mv command that makes the interactive mode the default: 

  $ alias mv 'mv -i'       (if using tcsh)
  $ alias mv='mv -i'       (if using bash)

See the help topics on aliases and shell configuration to do this. Once this is done, you can always use the -f (force) command line option to force the renaming of file to a target, even if the target already exists, without prompting the user for confirmation.

Copying files and directories with the cp command    [top]

Files and whole directories can be copied with the cp command. The simplest case of copying one file to another: 

  $ ls
  file1 
  $ cp file1 file2
  $ ls
  file1 file2

Copying a directory with cp requires a couple additional arguments on the command line: 

  $ ls -F
  project/
  $ cp -rp project project_backup
  $ ls
  project/ project_backup/

    The first argument -r stands for recursive and indicates that all subcomponents of the folder being copied should also be copied, following the tree structure recursively in each subfolder's subfolder and so on. The second argument -p is not required. It ensures that certain file attributes are preserved when copying. This includes the read-write permissions, and date of last modification. When copying a directory it is a good habit to always use this option.

A note of caution. If you are copying a file to a file that already exists, the cp does not, by default, prompt you for a confirmation of your intentions. I highly recommend you change this default behavior. See the following additional help topic:

http://oceanai.mit.edu/ivpman/help/cmdline_interactive_rm_mv_cp

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