bash - How do you send the output of ls to mv?

Question

I know you can do it with a find, but is there a way to send the output of ls to mv in the unix command line?

Answer 1

ls is a tool used to DISPLAY some statistics about filenames in a directory.

It is not a tool you should use to enumerate them and pass them to another tool for using it there. Parsing ls is almost always the wrong thing to do, and it is bugged in many ways.

For a detailed document on the badness of parsing ls, which you should really go read, check out: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs

Instead, you should use either globs or find, depending on what exactly you're trying to achieve:

mv * /foo
find . -exec mv {} /foo ;

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The main source of badness of parsing ls is that ls dumps all filenames into a single string of output, and there is no way to tell the filenames apart from there. For all you know, the entire ls output could be one single filename!

The secondary source of badness of parsing ls comes from the broken way in which half the world uses bash. They think for magically does what they would like it to do when they do something like:

for file in `ls`  # Never do this!
for file in $(ls) # Exactly the same thing.

for is a bash builtin that iterates over arguments. And $(ls) takes the output of ls and cuts it apart into arguments wherever there are spaces, newlines or tabs. Which basically means, you're iterating over words, not over filenames. Even worse, you're asking bask to take each of those mutilated filename words and then treat them as globs that may match filenames in the current directory. So if you have a filename which contains a word which happens to be a glob that matches other filenames in the current directory, that word will disappear and all those matching filenames will appear in its stead!

mv `ls` /foo      # Exact same badness as the ''for'' thing.