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I am in a trouble. I pressed 'enter' without the destination. I had two files in the same directory with a common IDENTIFIER in their name. I wanted to move them to a folder, so I entered

mv /path/to/file/IDENTIFIER*

But before I enter destination I pressed 'enter' and one of my file disappeared which was alphabetically higher.. Now I can not find that file anywhere. I was in my

Abhishek@abhishek$ directory in the terminal.

Can anyone give me an elaborate answer about how I can find or is it overwritten by the other file. I am a complete rookie in the Linux world but I know the workhow of the terminal. So I can do some basic commands.

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3 Answers 3

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7

If you have only two files, eg:

IDENTIFIER_1
IDENTIFIER_2

then you have overwritten IDENTIFIER_2 with the content of IDENTIFIER_1.

Example:

$ cat IDENTIFIER_1
IDENTIFIER_1

$ cat IDENTIFIER_2
IDENTIFIER_2

$ ls -og IDENTIFIER_*
-rw-rw-r-- 1  0 Mai 19 18:28 IDENTIFIER_1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 13 Mai 19 18:27 IDENTIFIER_2

$ mv IDENTIFIER_*

$ ls -og IDENTIFIER_*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 13 Mai 19 18:30 IDENTIFIER_2

$ cat IDENTIFIER_2 
IDENTIFIER_1

If you had had more than two files, then would be an error:

$ ls -og IDENTIFIER_*
-rw-rw-r-- 1  0 Mai 19 18:28 IDENTIFIER_1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 13 Mai 19 18:27 IDENTIFIER_2
-rw-rw-r-- 1  0 Mai 19 18:28 IDENTIFIER_3

$ mv IDENTIFIER_*
mv: target ‘IDENTIFIER_3’ is not a directory

For an even better explanation see @Serg.

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3
  • One of the tricks that I learned from years ago, to move the contents into mkdir z; mv * which moves everything into the directory z... of course, assuming that the z directory is the last item in the * expansion.
    – user153310
    May 19, 2015 at 21:28
  • 1
    Sounds dangerous :)
    – A.B.
    May 19, 2015 at 21:30
  • You could always touch a file named -i if you are worried about that.
    – user153310
    May 19, 2015 at 21:33
4

I would like to merely expand on the answer that A.B. posted.

The wildcard merely expands IDENTIFIER_* to all instances of IDENTIFIER_*. Therefore, mv IDENTIFIER_* in reality is read as mv IDENTIFIER_1 IDENTIFIER_2.

This is a same reason why for loops work like so for file in *; do , as well as echo IDENTIFIER_*, and so on and so forth.

Now the reason why 3 files dont work is again because the command mv IDENTIFIER_* expands to mv IDENTIFIER_1 IDENTIFIER_2 IDENTIFIER_3, and you are confusing mv with too many arguments.

enter image description here

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2
  • I should delete my answer =) +1
    – A.B.
    May 19, 2015 at 19:30
  • no, no, don't delete it. It's still shows everything correctly
    – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
    May 19, 2015 at 19:31
1

You overwrote the second file with the first one.

It's lost unless you unmount immediately the partition/device and try to recover it with a tool like testdisk, photorec, extundelete, or whatever.

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