CODEWITHSUNDEEP
git
user2329125
user2329125

Reputation:

Git move everything in a directory one directory up

I am on windows 7 and have this simple structure

+ gitroot
|- someDir
|-- lots
|-- of
|-- other
|-- stuff

And I want to move everything in someDir into gitroot.

This, and some of its variations, do not work

gitroot > git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
nothing to commit, working tree clean

gitroot > git --version
git version 2.9.2.windows.1

gitroot > git mv someDir\* .
fatal: bad source, source=someDir/*, destination=*

gitroot > git mv someDir/* .
fatal: bad source, source=someDir/*, destination=*

gitroot > git mv someDir/* ./ -k

The last one does not throw an error, but also does not do anything to my filesystem. I also tried to write out the paths completely with no success.

I don't know what gits problem is and it is bad at communicating it to me.

edit: I found the reason why someDir/* is not working. The shell I am using is not globbing and therefor git, rightfully so, expects to move a file named "someDir/*" which does not exist.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 4005

Answers (2)

Vampire
Vampire

Reputation: 38619

The help for git mv says:

it renames , which must exist and be either a file, symlink or directory

someDir\* is not an existing file, symlink or directory, except if you actually have a file, symlink or directory named like that. That is exactly what the error tells you. The source is not an existing file, symlink or directory.

To make it work you could either do

mv someDir/* . && git add .

or execute it in Git Bash which already does the expanding of the *, but then you need

git mv somedir/* somedir/.* .

as in bash * does not exand hidden files (i. e. files starting with .).

Alternatively you can also manually expand the files and move them separately like

git ls-tree --name-only @ gitspindle/ | xargs -ri git mv {} .

Upvotes: 2

Mark Adelsberger
Mark Adelsberger

Reputation: 45659

I believe the problem is that git is expecting your shell to expand the *, which is not happening. If you use git bash, it should. Or you could try manually listing out the directories to be moved, but it sounds like there's a lot of them so that may not be good.

A simple work-around, as noted in the comments, is to move the files using OS commands instead of git, and then do a git add .. That's actually all that git mv does anyway (for which reason I never bother with git mv. (EDIT: To clarify, that's all it's doing in this case. There are situations, like submodules, where git mv offers some nice automation of house-keeping details.)

In comments you expressed concern about losing history. The truth is, no matter whether you use git mv or not, git records the change as "file at old path deleted; new file at new path". It attempts to infer after the fact that this was really "file moved from old path to new path" and has just as much chance of inferring this correctly no matter which command you use to do the move.

Upvotes: 2

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