Course/Working with Files & Directories/Moving & Renaming

Moving & Renaming

Use mv to move files between directories and rename them in place.

mv (move) serves double duty: it moves files to a new location and renames them. In fact, renaming is just moving a file to the same directory with a different name. One command, two jobs.

mv old-name.txt new-name.txt           # rename a file
mv report.txt Documents/               # move to another directory
mv draft.txt Documents/final.txt       # move AND rename in one step

Unlike cp, mv doesn't leave the original behind. The file is gone from its old location and appears at the new one. This makes it perfect for organizing files — moving downloads into the right folders, renaming files to follow a convention, or restructuring a project.

Just like cp, mv will overwrite the destination without warning if a file with that name already exists. Use mv -i to get a confirmation prompt before overwriting. This is especially important when moving files into a directory that might already contain a file with the same name.

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There's no mv undo. Once a file is moved or renamed, the original path is gone. Double-check your destination before pressing Enter, especially when renaming files in bulk.

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A common workflow: download a file, rename it to something meaningful, then move it to the right place. You can do the rename and move in a single mv command.

There's a file called draft-report.txt in your home directory. It needs to be filed away as report.txt inside Documents. Can you do both the move and rename in a single command?

Practice