OSX Terminal command to move all files in directory

Question

i'm at the OSX terminal now and try to move a lot of files from ~/Desktop/dir/ to ~/Desktop/dir/dir2.

Command

mv *.* ~/Desktop/dir/dir2

doesn't work.

Answer 1

You're getting "too many argument" because there are probably too many files in ~/Desktop/dir/ that that are allowed by glob matching pattern on command line.

To move all files from ~/Desktop/dir/ to ~/Desktop/dir/dir2 use this find instead:

find ~/Desktop/dir/ -type f -execdir mv '{}' ~/Desktop/dir/dir2 \;

Or to move everything including files and directories use:

cd ~/Desktop/dir/
find . -path './dir2' -prune -o ! -name . -exec mv '{}' ./dir2 \;

i.e. other than dir2 and . move everything to ~/Desktop/dir/dir2