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How can I remove all subdirectories but keep those files in the parent directory?

I am using ksh on AIX and my directory structure looks like below.

dir/
    subdir1/file1
    subdir2/file2
    subdir3/file3

I want to remove all subdirectories subdir1

, subdir2

etc. I want to save files file1

, file2

etc. In dir

. On the other hand, I want to move all files in subdirs

to dir

and then delete all empty ones subdirs

. So the end result will be:

dir/
    file1
    file2
    file3
    ....

Which command should you use?

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2 answers


I would just use a command find

that should work in any shell:

find ./dir -mindepth 2 -type f -exec mv {} ./dir/ \;

It starts with ./dir

and finds files below the first level ./dir

and then moves those files to ./dir

.



To remove empty subdirectories use:

find ./dir -mindepth 1 -type d -empty -delete

Warning . This will overwrite files with the same name if file name conflicts occur.

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Move the files first and then remove empty subdirectories; from dir/

:

mv subdir*/file* ./ && rmdir subdir*/


/

after the directory name indicates that we are dealing with a directory. You can refine with globbing using ?

or [:digit:]

to match filename / directory names.

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