mv: cannot stat error : No such file or directory error

Question

I need to move the files of a directory to another directory.I get stat error when I used the following program.

for i in dir1/*.txt_dir; do
mv $i/*.txt  dir2/`basename $i`.txt
done

error message

mv: cannot stat `dir1/aa7.txt_dir/*.txt': No such file or directory

Answer 1

Normally, when a glob which does not match any filenames is expanded, it remains unchanged. Thus, you get results like this:

$ rm .bak rm: cannot remove ` .bak': No such file or directory

To avoid this we need to change the default value of nullglob variable.

    #BASH

    shopt -s nullglob

    for i in dir1/*.txt_dir; do
       mv $i/*.txt  dir2/'basename $i'.txt
    done

Read more about it here: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/NullGlob

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

mv $i/*.txt  dir2/`basename $i`.txt

This doesn't work when there are no text files in $i/ . The shell passes the raw string "$i/*.txt" to mv with the unexpanded * in it, which mv chokes on.

Try something like this:

for i in dir1/*.txt_dir; do
    find $i -name '*.txt' -exec mv {} dir2/`basename $i`.txt \;
done

Answer 3

when you put directory/* alone in for iteration, it list each file with absolute path. use `ls

for i in ls dir1/*.txt_dir ; do

Answer 4

Whilst it is not shown in your example - using the correct quotes is important. in BASH "*" evaluates to * and '*' evaluates to the expansion glob. so

`ls *`

will show all files in directory and

`ls "*"`

will show all files named the literal *