How to move all files within a directory to the parent directory in Bash?

July 27, 2024

I need to provide a GitHub workflow for a help documentation written using the mdBook utility, where mdBook produces artifacts into a book directory.

After moving these artifacts to the top of my local Ubuntu repository, I would then commit the local repository changes to a particular GitHub branch.

I’ve tried that:

mv -f book .
rm -rf book

I get:

mv: ‘book’ and ‘./book’ are the same file

I’ve also tried that:

mv -f book ..
rm -rf book

It works, but I get nothing with this (I lose all files).

I have tried cp -r book <something like "." or "..">, but it did not go either.

I do not think I can try using / or ~ as a copy destination because the working repository is probably under another directory.

Here’s the full workflow:

name: Build

on:
  push:
    branches: [ "master" ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ "master" ]
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      logLevel:
        description: 'Log level'
        required: true
        default: 'warning'
        type: choice
        options:
        - info
        - warning
        - debug
      tags:
        description: 'Build'
        required: false
        type: boolean
      environment:
        description: 'Environment to run tests against'
        type: environment
        required: true

permissions:
  contents: write

env:
  CARGO_TERM_COLOR: always

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Install mdbook CLI
        run: cargo install mdbook --version ~0.4
      - name: Build book
        run: mdbook build
      - name: Git commit report
        run: |
          mv -f book .
          rm -rf book

          # Git commit
          git config --global user.name '<username>'
          git config --global user.email '<e-mail>'
          git switch -C live
          git rm -r .github src theme .gitignore book.toml
          git add .
          git commit -m "Automated report"
          git push origin -f live