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SilentKnight
SilentKnight

Reputation: 14021

mv: "Directory not Empty" - how do you merge directories with `mv`?

I tried to deploy my personal blog website to my remote server recently. When I tried to move a few files and directories to another place by executing mv, some unexpected errors happened. The command line echoed "Directory not Empty". After doing some googling, I tried again with '-f' switch or '-v', the same result showed. I logged in on the root account, and the process is here:

root@danielpan:~# shopt -s dotglob
root@danielpan:~# mv /var/www/html/wordpress/* /var/www/html
mv: cannot move `/var/www/html/wordpress/wp-content` to `/var/www/html/wp-content`: 
Directory not empty
root@danielpan:~# mv -f /var/www/html/wordpress/* /var/www/html
mv: cannot move `/var/www/html/wordpress/wp-content` to `/var/www/html/wp-content`:
Directory not empty

Anybody know why?

(I'm running Ubuntu 14.04)

Upvotes: 24

Views: 101867

Answers (5)

John Tribe
John Tribe

Reputation: 1622

If you have sub-directories and "mv" is not working:

cp -R source/* destination/ 
rm -R source/

Upvotes: 42

mafu
mafu

Reputation: 32650

Try the mmv tool instead of mv.

Collisions and Deletions

   When  any two or more matching files would have to be moved, copied, or linked to the same
   target filename, mmv detects the condition as an  error  before  performing  any  actions.
   Furthermore,  mmv  checks if any of its actions will result in the destruction of existing
   files.  If the -d (delete) option is specified, all file deletions or overwrites are  done
   silently.

Upvotes: 0

pedda
pedda

Reputation: 126

I use rsync normally for copying. In case you are running out of space on your hard disk and your destination file structure is more complex (so you can't or don't want to simply delete the destination folder to free the space for moving), you can use the option --remove-source-files (for more info about this option on superuser) of rsync! It will asynchronously delete the source files directly after the rsyncing to destination. So you just don't need the double space of disk space, instead it is only a relatively small amount of disk space during the rsyncing. After the rsyncing all disk space is freed from the transferred files. So you could more easily achieve your goal by:

$ rsync -avh --remove-source-files --info=progress2 --size-only /var/www/html/wordpress/* /var/www/html

In this case I added a progress bar, rsynced with all file attributes and verbosed them and only rsynced files which differ in size (which does not matter here as rsync "touches" every file and therefore afterwards it is deleted)

Upvotes: 1

mr NAE
mr NAE

Reputation: 3372

Instead of copying directories by cp or rsync, I prefer

cd ${source_path}
find . -type d -exec mkdir -p ${destination_path}/{} \;
find . -type f -exec mv {} ${destination_path}/{} \;
cd $oldpwd

moves files (actually renames them) and overwrites existing ones. So it's fast enough. But when ${source_path} contains empty subfolders you can cleanup by rm -rf ${source_path}

Upvotes: 2

SilentKnight
SilentKnight

Reputation: 14021

I found the solution finally. Because the /var/www/html/wp-content already exists, then when you try to copy /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-content there, error of Directory not Empty happens. So you need to copy /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-content/* to /var/www/html/wp-content. Just execute this:

mv /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-content/* /var/www/html/wp-content
rmdir /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-content
rmdir /var/www/html/wordpress

Upvotes: 3

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