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coreutils: Target directory

 
 2.8 Target directory
 ====================
 
 The ‘cp’, ‘install’, ‘ln’, and ‘mv’ commands normally treat the last
 operand specially when it is a directory or a symbolic link to a
 directory.  For example, ‘cp source dest’ is equivalent to ‘cp source
 dest/source’ if ‘dest’ is a directory.  Sometimes this behavior is not
 exactly what is wanted, so these commands support the following options
 to allow more fine-grained control:
 
 ‘-T’
 ‘--no-target-directory’
      Do not treat the last operand specially when it is a directory or a
      symbolic link to a directory.  This can help avoid race conditions
      in programs that operate in a shared area.  For example, when the
      command ‘mv /tmp/source /tmp/dest’ succeeds, there is no guarantee
      that ‘/tmp/source’ was renamed to ‘/tmp/dest’: it could have been
      renamed to ‘/tmp/dest/source’ instead, if some other process
      created ‘/tmp/dest’ as a directory.  However, if ‘mv -T /tmp/source
      /tmp/dest’ succeeds, there is no question that ‘/tmp/source’ was
      renamed to ‘/tmp/dest’.
 
      In the opposite situation, where you want the last operand to be
      treated as a directory and want a diagnostic otherwise, you can use
      the ‘--target-directory’ (‘-t’) option.
 
 ‘-t DIRECTORY’
 ‘--target-directory=DIRECTORY’
      Use DIRECTORY as the directory component of each destination file
      name.
 
      The interface for most programs is that after processing options
      and a finite (possibly zero) number of fixed-position arguments,
      the remaining argument list is either expected to be empty, or is a
      list of items (usually files) that will all be handled identically.
      The ‘xargs’ program is designed to work well with this convention.
 
      The commands in the ‘mv’-family are unusual in that they take a
      variable number of arguments with a special case at the _end_
      (namely, the target directory).  This makes it nontrivial to
      perform some operations, e.g., “move all files from here to ../d/”,
      because ‘mv * ../d/’ might exhaust the argument space, and ‘ls |
      xargs ...’ doesn’t have a clean way to specify an extra final
      argument for each invocation of the subject command.  (It can be
      done by going through a shell command, but that requires more human
      labor and brain power than it should.)
 
      The ‘--target-directory’ (‘-t’) option allows the ‘cp’, ‘install’,
      ‘ln’, and ‘mv’ programs to be used conveniently with ‘xargs’.  For
      example, you can move the files from the current directory to a
      sibling directory, ‘d’ like this:
 
           ls | xargs mv -t ../d --
 
      However, this doesn’t move files whose names begin with ‘.’.  If
      you use the GNU ‘find’ program, you can move those files too, with
      this command:
 
           find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 \
             | xargs mv -t ../d
 
      But both of the above approaches fail if there are no files in the
      current directory, or if any file has a name containing a blank or
      some other special characters.  The following example removes those
      limitations and requires both GNU ‘find’ and GNU ‘xargs’:
 
           find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -print0 \
             | xargs --null --no-run-if-empty \
                 mv -t ../d
 
 The ‘--target-directory’ (‘-t’) and ‘--no-target-directory’ (‘-T’)
 options cannot be combined.
 

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