Hi everybody!

\o

huh why is moving files in a directory not working?

mv /home/paul/testit/testnothing/* ~/testit/output

yet I can see the directory exists:

stat "/home/paul/testit/testnothing"
  File: /home/paul/testit/testnothing
  Size: 4096      	Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   directory
Device: 803h/2051d	Inode: 370056      Links: 2
Access: (0775/drwxrwxr-x)  Uid: ( 1000/    paul)   Gid: ( 1000/    paul)
Access: 2021-07-12 15:35:58.594515921 +0200
Modify: 2021-07-12 15:36:09.242155248 +0200
Change: 2021-07-12 15:36:09.242155248 +0200
 Birth: -

but always the following error: mv: cannot stat '/home/paul/testit/testnothing/*': No such file or directory

@paul23 what error do you get? The quoted one will fail since the quotes protect the * from expansion which is why, as you see in the error, it is trying to find a file actually named '/home/paul/testit/testnothing/*'

hmm than how would I quote this?

but I thought double quotes (in contrast to singular quotes) means bash expands variables and macros?

variables yes, globs no

terdon@tpad foo $ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 terdon terdon 0 Jul 12 15:38 file1
-rw-r--r-- 1 terdon terdon 0 Jul 12 15:38 file2
terdon@tpad foo $ echo "*"
*
terdon@tpad foo $ echo *
file1 file2

I can't be sure since you haven't shared the error message, but something like this:

mv /home/paul/testit/testnothing/* ~/testit/output

Would fail if i) the source dir doesn't exist, ii) the target dir doesn't exist or you don't have write accesss and iii) if the source dir is empty or has only hidden files in which case it won't fail, but it won't copy anything. What is actually happening in your case, @paul23?

Moo

Whoever runs the askubuntu social might want to re-share that :D

There's an askubuntu social?

Also, cool! Sounds like a fun podcast (or whatever form it will take).

@terdon probably the twitter account

@jokerdino Oh, SE's twitter bot? Right.

long time ago, we had a google plus account. that's the only social we had