Ubuntu - “mv” command renames file to empty file name

Question

I have a simple script to move files between directories. Basically, it is:

mv /dir/* /dir/proc/

saved into a shell script "mvproc.sh".

For some reason, when I run the script (sh mvproc.sh) the file indeed gets moved, but it does not retain the filename and instead gets just an empty filename. When I run the same command at the bash prompt, it works fine however.

This script used to work fine on Debian but we had a hard drive failure and I am now migrating everything over to a Ubuntu machine.

Any idea why this is happening? It seems so simple yet I cannot figure it out.

Many thanks.

edit...

I think I found the solution. For some reason it was putting in carriage returns and maybe line breaks or something that I could not see while editing the sh script in either Notepad++ or even gedit. To solve this, when I open the scripts in gedit, I do a Save As, and select Unix/Linux in the drop down menu towards the bottom. This hopefully gets rid of the weird carriage returns even though I could not see them.

Hopefully this helps some poor soul like me in the future pulling their hair out over this!

Thanks!

Answer 1

Try: mv /dir/file /dir/proc/file

You are indeed moving the file, but aren't specifying a destination name. Other usages of mv :

Move and rename: mv /dir/filename /dir/proc/newfilename

Rename: mv /dir/filename /dir/newfilename