How to move all files including hidden files into parent directory via *

Its must be a popular question but I could not find an answer.

How to move all files via * including hidden files as well to parent directory like this:

mv /path/subfolder/* /path/

This will move all files to parent directory like expected but will not move hidden files. How to do that?

Answer

You can find a comprehensive set of solutions on this in UNIX & Linux’s answer to How do you move all files (including hidden) from one directory to another?. It shows solutions in Bash, zsh, ksh93, standard (POSIX) sh, etc.

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You can use these two commands together:

mv /path/subfolder/* /path/   # your current approach
mv /path/subfolder/.* /path/  # this one for hidden files

Or all together (thanks pfnuesel):

mv /path/subfolder/{.,}* /path/

Which expands to:

mv /path/subfolder/* /path/subfolder/.* /path/

(example: echo a{.,}b expands to a.b ab)

Note this will show a couple of warnings:

mv: cannot move ‘/path/subfolder/.’ to /path/.’: Device or resource busy
mv: cannot remove /path/subfolder/..’: Is a directory

Just ignore them: this happens because /path/subfolder/{.,}* also expands to /path/subfolder/. and /path/subfolder/.., which are the directory and the parent directory (See What do “.” and “..” mean when in a folder?).

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If you want to just copy, you can use a mere:

cp -r /path/subfolder/. /path/
#                     ^
#                     note the dot!

This will copy all files, both normal and hidden ones, since /path/subfolder/. expands to “everything from this directory” (Source: How to copy with cp to include hidden files and hidden directories and their contents?)