Comment

Comment on mv *.jpg is complete bullshit.

GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

This is not standard behavior. Got links to StackOverflow?

This works just fine in bash and zsh:

encoded_funky_name=IUAjJCVeJiooKVtde30nIjo7IGxzOyAmYW1wOyA8Plx8YH5gJChscykke1BBVEh9ISF8fCYmLmpwZw==
# decodes to: !@#$%^&*()[]{}'":; ls; &amp; <>\|`~`$(ls)${PATH}!!||&&.jpg

mkdir temp
cd temp
mkdir temp2

touch $(echo "${encoded_funky_name}" | base64 -d)

mv ./*.jpg temp2
ls -lR

mv temp2/*.jpg .
ls -lR

Note that it is recommended to use “./” before a raw * in globs to avoid filenames beginning with “-” being interpreted by the command as special arguments (this is not necessary in the above example, but it is a good habit). See dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in-shell.html#globb… for more info. e.g.:

touch ./-laR 

# Bad ls command:
ls *

# Good ls command:
ls ./*

having it put each name in quotes should be fucking trivial

This is effectively what happens, except that it’s actually more robust than that, since it also accounts for names with quotes and other special characters. Glob expansion does NOT output file names into the shell; it passes them as arguments to the command with no further shell processing. Arguments can contain any special characters.

Not sure why you’re seeing this behavior. Are you doing something with these file names before passing them to mv? Storing them in variables? Saving them to files?

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mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s literally just mv *.jpg /mnt/Example/Pictures.

Multiple StackOverflow answers take this as read.

mv ./*.jpg /mnt/Example/Pictures works fine, though, so thank you for the practical solution. I’m still disgusted there’s any filename that gets treated as… not a filename. That broken stair might be older than I am.

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- GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Ahhh. That’s a confusing thread, with a couple confounding factors.
  
  The OP in that thread is attempting to a batch rename, which is out of scope of the mv command.
  
  If you are NOT trying to change the name of the file, I recommend always making the last argument of mv your destination directory, rather than the destination file. This is strictly mandatory if you are moving multiple files.
  
  OP in that SO thread used the filename as the destination path — a filename which did not exist, and therefore could not be resolved by the wildcard. And if it had existed, the move would have failed. Because of that, mv /data/*/Sample_*/logs/*_Data_time.err /data/*/Sample_*/logs/*_Data_time_orig.err is not a valid command.
  
  OP cannot accomplish what they want with a single mv command. They would need to use a loop or something like find.
  
  I agree that the lack of universal consistency in how commands handle arguments is unfortunate. There’s no way around that without reinventing the entire OS. Many commands let you pass ‘–’ as an argument to signify that any subsequent arguments should not be interpreted as options even if they begin with ‘-’. But that’s entirely up to the implementation of each program; it’s not a shell feature.
  
  Future OS designers: consider typed arguments. Abandon all legacy cruft.
  
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  - mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    There’s no way around that without reinventing the entire OS.
    
    Disagree. If wildcard expansion is not a feature of the tool, it shouldn’t be up to the tool to shape how each expanded input is passed. Some hideous escape syntax ought to force *.jpg to appear as “-a.jpg” instead of -a.jpg, once it reaches mv.
    
    Instead * is acting as a cheeky little ls alternative, minus any degree of formatting control, and piping actual ls input into mv is similarly fraught with complications.
    
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    GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Some hideous escape syntax ought to force *.jpg to appear as “-a.jpg” instead of -a.jpg, once it reaches mv
    
    The issue here is that there’s no difference here between -a.jpg and “-a.jpg”.
    
    Go ahead and try these commands. They are 100% equivalent:
    
    ls -laR ls "-laR" ls '-laR'
    
    The reason these are equivalent is because quoting (and expansion, and globbing) is processed in the shell. The shell then passes the evaluated string as an argument to the tool. All of those evaluate to the same string, so they look exactly the same to the ls command.
    
    What is the solution if there’s a file name that matches something the tool thinks is an argument? What would the correct behavior be?
    
    The only solution is to include some way to communicate to the tool what each argument is. In practice, you could do ls – * and it would work even if the first filename was “-laR”. However, not all tools use the – convention. This is really core to the design of the OS, in that command arguments have no type.
    
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NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Note that it is recommended to use “./” before a raw * in globs to avoid filenames beginning with “-” being interpreted by the command as special arguments

Jackpot! I think! Based on OP’s reply to me, this is almost definitely the real problem:

mv *.jpg /mnt/Example/Pictures

Where it will then die with an error like mv: invalid option – ‘1’ depending on the contents of the current directory.

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