Moving files in Terminal

[adn rcd dly]

Hey guys,

I am just learning Terminal and so far it has been fun but frustrating. I'm learning from online manuals and the manual within Terminal so everything is pretty verbose for someone that doesn't know the language yet. I apologize if this has been answered elsewhere, but the search gave me many results about moving files to the Trash or making a folder hidden. These are not my concerns for today. And for the reference, I know this can be done as a "drag-and-drop" operation in Finder, but as I said, I'm learning

So I am trying to move a couple of PDFs from my Documents folder to one I created within the Documents folder.

The command I have been trying is

mv /Users/adn/Documents/"UT State TX Receipt.pdf" ~/Users/adn/Documents/Finances

Using that code I got "Permission denied"
So I tried

sudo mv /Users/adn/Documents/"UT State TX Receipt.pdf" ~/Users/adn/Documents/Finances

Prompted for the password, I entered it and got: "No such file or directory"

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Using Terminal 2.0.2 on a Mac Mini using OS X 10.5.8

Thanks again guys.

 

[gr8tfly]

The quotes need to be around the entire path string, or not used at all (spaces are "\ ").

 

[adn rcd dly]

mv /Users/adn/Documents/UT\ State\ TX\ Receipt.pdf ~/Users/adn/Documents/Finances

so like that? that also gives me "No such file or directory"

does it make a difference what Directory you are currently in?

 

[gr8tfly]

"~" points to your user home directory (/Users/<username>), so the destination path you are trying to use evaluates to "/Users/adn/Users/adn/......".

 

[adn rcd dly]

Wow. I can't believe I didn't fully read the error it gave.
"/Users/adn/Users/adn/Documents/Finances: No such file or directory"

thanks for that info.

so it continued to give that error but the file is moved. i am looking through all the lines of command and there isn't one line that doesn't have the "No such file or directory" error but it moved anyway. I will try with another file.

mv ~/Documents/File\ Name.pdf ~/Documents/Finances

does that look correct?

 

[gr8tfly]

Looks right.

btw: you can drag items from the Finder to Terminal and it will automatically create the correct path string for you for the item.

 

[adn rcd dly]

sweet. it worked out. thanks again for the help. there were about 3 more PDFs so I used

 mv ~/Documents/*.pdf ~/Documents/Finances

worked magnificently. i may go to the Library (the physical one) and look for "Terminal for Dummies"