What happens with a comma(,) on a MV command?-CodePudding

I 'fat-fingered' a comma to the end of a mv command

mv path/file .,

The file seems to have disappeared into an ether somewhere. 'find' found nothing.

CodePudding user response：

Unlike . and .., the name ., has no special meaning, so the file is there and is actually named .,.

Verify that the file is there:

ls -l .,

You can move it back by just reversing the arguments to mv:

mv ., path/file

CodePudding user response：

Linux ls command hide files starting with a dot. If you only type ls all the files or directories like .ssh or .bashrc in your home directory will not be displayed. To get all files, you have to give ls -a option ( all ).

What you did by moving with mv path/file ., is simply moving your source file to the destination .,, means your file has exactly this name. By entering ls -a or even `ls -l .,' you see it as all other normal files.

You simply can copy or move it again with mv ., <destination_path/destination_name>.

You said: " 'find' found nothing."

That is maybe a wrong observation as find will see all files even those which starting with a dot.

find -maxdepth 1 | grep ',' gives: ./.,

Maybe you searches in the wrong place?

CodePudding user response：

I have done the same and I find the ".," easily:

ls -ltra | grep ","
-rwxrwxrwx 1 user1 user1          0 Jan 19 10:09 .,

The deal is the usage of the a switch in the ls command: this also shows file, starting with a dot (which are in fact normally invisible in UNIX/Linux), as you can see from the manpage:

DESCRIPTION
   List  information  about the FILEs (the current directory by default).  
Sort entries alphabetically if none of
   -cftuvSUX nor --sort is specified.

   Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

   -a, --all
          do not ignore entries starting with .

Oh, you need to look into the parent directory of the path directory :-)