I've just lost a small part of my audio collection, by a stupid mistake I made. :-(GLADLY I had a fairly recent backup, but it was still irritating. Apart from yours truly, the other culprit doing the mischief was mv, which will show as follows:  The audio files had a certain scheme: ARTIST - Some Title YY.mp3where YY is the 2-digit year specification.mkdir 90<invisible control character>(Up to this moment, I did not know that I had actually typed one third excess character which was invisible ...!)Instead of having all in one directory, I wanted to have all 1990s music in one directory. So I typed:find . -name '* 9?.mp3' -exec mv {} 90 \;Not so hard to get the idea what happened eh? :->The (disastrous) result was a virgin empty directory called '90 something' (with something being the invisible control character) and one single file called '90', overwritten n times.ALL FILES WERE GONE. :-(( (obviously)Wish mv would've checked in time whether the signature of the destination file (remember on *NIX: Everything Is A File) starts with a d------ (e. g. drwxr-xr-x). And, of course, whether the destination exists at all. There is a variant of the aforementioned scenario, when you simply forgot to mkdir the directory first. (but of course, you assumed that it's there...)Even our pet-hate OS starting with the capital W DOES DO THIS. You get even prompted to specify the type of destination (file? directory?) if you ask for it.Hence, I'm wondering if we *NIXers still have to write ourselves a mv scriptlet just to avoid these kinds of most unwanted surprises.
How to prevent `mv` from moving a collection of files into a single regular one?
mv
You can append a / to the destination if you want to move files to adirectory. In case the directory does not exist you'll receive an error:mv somefile somedir/mv: cannot move somefile to somedir/: Not a directoryIn case the directory exists, it moves the file into that directory.