Information about Mv

MV can stand for:

• MV Mercury-vapor lamp
• Maldives (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 top level domain country code)
• MV is the IATA code for Armenian International Airways
• Martha's Vineyard
• Maroon 5, where 'V' would refer to the roman numeral for five.
• Mission Viejo, California, USA
• Moreno Valley, California, USA
• Mountain View, California, USA
• Melbourne Victory FC, an Australian football (soccer) club
• Merchant vessel, also motor vessel, a class of ship used in commercial or public transportation operations.
• Monte Vista, a private residential estate in Ma On Shan, Sha Tin District, Hong Kong S.A.R., China
• The German state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
• Media Ventures, an American film scoring company
• Meccanica Verghera, as in MV Agusta, an Italian motorcycle company
• Miami Vice, an 80s TV series
• Michael Vick, NFL Player
• Association of American Railroads Reporting mark of the Midland Valley Railroad
• Millivolt (mV), 1/1000 of a volt
• Megavolt (MV), 1000000 volts
• Minute volume, in medicine.
• Millennium Volunteers
• Music video
• mv, the unix command
• Materialized view, a concept in database management systems
• Mv, the former chemical symbol for Mendelevium (Md)
• The censored title of Moist Vagina, a song by grunge band Nirvana

MV can also be:

• MV Agusta, an Italian Motorcycle manufacturer

---

mv (short for move) is a Unix command that moves one or more files or directories from one place to another. The original file is deleted, and the new file may have the same or a different name. If possible (i.e. when the original and new files are on the same file system), mv will rename the file instead. Write permission is required on all directories being modified.

Conflicting existing file

In all cases, when a file is moved to have the name of an existing file (in the same directory), the existing file is deleted. If the existing file is not writable but is in a directory that is writable, then the mv command asks for confirmation if possible (i.e. if run from a terminal) before proceeding, unless the -f (force) option is used.

Differences with copy and delete

Note that, usually, when moving files within the same volume, moving (and/or renaming) is not the same as simply copying and then deleting the original. When moving a file, the link is simply removed from the old parent directory and added to the new parent directory. However, the file itself is untouched (i.e. it has the same inodes and resides at the same place on the disk). For example, you cannot copy a file you cannot read, but you can move (and/or rename) it (provided you have write permission to its old and new parent directories). Also, suppose there is a non-empty directory you do not have write permission to. You cannot delete this directory (since you cannot delete its contents); but you can move (and/or rename) it. Also, since moving does not involve copying, it is faster and does not place strain of lots of reads and writes on the disk.

Moving files across different volumes, however, does necessitate copying and moving. This difference in behavior of moving files is sometimes confusing.

Examples

mv myfile mynewfilename renames a file mv myfile otherfilename renames a file and deletes the existing file "otherfilename" mv myfile /myfile moves 'myfile' from the current directory to the root directory mv myfile dir/myfile moves 'myfile' to 'dir/myfile' relative to the current directory mv myfile dir same as the previous command (the filename is implied to be the same) mv myfile dir/myfile2 moves 'myfile' to dir and renames it to 'myfile2' mv foo bar baz dir moves multiple files to directory dir mv --help shows a very concise help about the syntax of the command man mv prints an extensive user manual for 'mv' in the terminal

In all cases, the file or files being moved or renamed can be a directory.

Note that when the command is called with two arguments (as mv name1 name2 or mv name1 /dir/name2), it can have three different effects, depending on whether name2 does not exist, is an existing file, or is an existing directory. If the user intends to refer to an existing directory, /. (or in some Unix versions / is sufficient) may be appended to the name to force the system to check this. To move a file to a new directory, the directory must be created first.

See also

• cp
• rm
• List of Unix programs

External links

• [ mv]: move (rename) files

•  • [ e] Unix command line programs and builtins (more)
File and file system management	cat chattr cd chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp du df file fsck fuser ln ls lsof mkdir mount mv pwd rm rmdir split touch
Process management	at chroot crontab exit kill killall nice pgrep pidof pkill ps sleep time top wait watch
User Management/Environment	env finger id logname mesg passwd su sudo uname uptime w wall who whoami write
Text processing	awk comm cut ed ex fmt head iconv join less more paste sed sort tac tail tr uniq wc xargs
Shell programming	basename echo expr false printf test true unset
Printing: lp Communications: inetd netstat ping rlogin nc traceroute Searching: find grep strings Miscellaneous: banner bc cal dd man size yes