I was trying to correct the spelling on a directory, issued a mv command, and the directory is now gone. I'd like to understand--specifically--what happened.Here's the command I ran:mv micheal_franti_theme/ michael_franti_theme/I understand there the slashes shouldn't be included: I was moving fast and used auto-complete.The command ran without any errors or warnings. I tried using find for both the old and new spellings, but neither returned any results. So, what happened? What did mv actually do? Any chance of recovering the directory and its contents?ext4 on CentOS 6.5; mv version 8.4Additional InfoNot sure why this is getting down votes.There was a directory named micheal_franti_theme. I ran the above command, then ran ls. No more directory.No directory named michael_franti_theme existed anywhere on the file system when I ran that command.As you can see from the command, the context is within the same sub-directory, so mv would have just updated the inode table (vs copying between file systems).I ran the following:sudo find / -name micheal_franti_themeNo results. The directory is goneAll commands posted in this question were copied directly from the command prompt.I've been using Linux regularly for over a decade. I've never seen this happen before, so I'm bringing it to serverfault.actual results are long gone from the scrollback buffer, but here are the relevant lines from history:1097  ls1098  mv micheal_franti_theme/ michael_franti_theme/1099  ls1100  find / -name michael_franti_theme 2>/dev/null1101  find / -name micheal_franti_theme 2>/dev/null1102  sudo find / -name michael_franti_theme1103  sudo find / -name micheal_franti_theme
mv deleted my directory. Why?
linux;centos;filesystems
The only way I can get that command to run without errors is if both directories already exist. Or if only the source name exists.If both directories do exist, what the command does is that it moves one directory into the other. So, you'll now have a directory named michael_franti_theme/micheal_franti_theme.If only the source name exists, what the command does is a simple rename. So you'd have a directory named michael_franti_theme.In both cases a directory named michael_franti_theme would exist after the rename. If more than one person is administrating this system, that directory could have been renamed again after the mv command but before running any ls or other command to look for the renamed directory.It is also possible, that your current working directory wasn't what you think it was, and the files are somewhere else in the file system from where you are looking now.