Re: Add --parents option to mv command in order to create parents directories

[Rémy Lefevre]

Alright. Using hard links is a good idea. I'm curious to know what the general difference between:

"mv src dst" and "cp -l src dst && rm src"

Regards,

Rémy.

2013/5/8 Pádraig Brady <address@hidden>

On 04/28/2013 05:55 PM, Rémy Lefevre wrote:
> Hello,
>
> mkdir and cp commands have the --parents option to create parents directories as needed. But this option is missing in mv. One has to create first the directory structure using mkdir --parents and then mv the file. This option is fine for simple moving command, but if one want to move files according to a pattern in a big tree structure, it starts to be too complicate as the directory name should be extracted for almost each moved file.
>
> So another solution is to use the cp --parents command and then delete the original files. But this solution is far from good for all the reasons that differentiate a copy from a move.
>
> So I propose to add a --parents option to mv command in order to create the parents directories as needed. In the case of acceptance, I could write a patch to add this feature.

Maybe, but I'm not sold on the need TBH.
At first glance it seems like it's uncommon enough
that using cp might suffice?  You could even do
this efficiently within a file system like:

{ cp -l --parents src dst || cp --parents src dst } && rm -r src

thanks,
Pádraig.