I am migrating my home directory from an old system to a new one, and the tarball I made contains everything, including hidden files like .bashrc. However, when I move the contents of the unpacked tarball (which are in /tmp) to my new home directory, the hidden files do not copy (mv /tmp/home/rcook/* /home/rcook/). How can I get mv to move them?

Actually, I think the problem is not with mv, but with bash's globbing. If I do this:

mkdir a

mkdir b

touch a/.foo

touch a/bar

mv a/* b/

ls -a a/ b/

I see this:

a/:

.  ..  .foo



b/:

.  ..  bar

a/.foo did not move. So how can I get the * wildcard to find hidden files?

Yes, I suppose I could decompress the tarball directly into my home directory, but the tarball decompresses into home/rcook/..., and I want to be sure I overwrite the new .bashrc, etc. with the old, customized versions, and knowing how to find and move hidden files is a worthwhile skill. Suggestions?

Some answers suggest doing something like mv src/.* dest/. However, I tried this on my test directories and got errors. Starting with:

rcook$ ls -a a/ b/

a/:

.  ..  bar  .foo



b/:

.  ..

rcook$ mv a/.* b/

mv: cannot move 'a/.' to 'b/.': Device or resource busy

mv: cannot remove 'a/..': Is a directory

rcook$ ls -a a/ b/

a/:

.  ..  bar



b/:

.  ..  .foo

What am I doing wrong?