# Ant User Manual

## Move

### Description

Moves a file to a new file or directory, or sets of files to a new directory. By default, the destination file is overwritten if it already exists. When overwrite is turned off, then files are only moved if the source file is newer than the destination file, or when the destination file does not exist.

FileSets are used to select sets of files to move to the todir directory.

### Parameters

Attribute | Description | Required
file | the file to move | One of file or at least one nested fileset element
tofile | the file to move to | With the file attribute, either tofile or todir can be used. With a nested fileset, only todir is allowed.
todir | the directory to move to
overwrite | overwrite existing files even if the destination files are newer (default is "true") | No
filtering | indicates whether token filtering should take place during the move. See the filter task for a description of how filters work. | No
flatten | ignore directory structure of source directory, copy all files into a single directory, specified by the todir attribute (default is "false").Note that you can achieve the same effect by using a flatten mapper | No
includeEmptyDirs | Copy empty directories included with the nested FileSet(s). Defaults to "yes". | No

### Parameters specified as nested elements

#### mapper

You can define file name transformations by using a nested mapper element. The default mapper used by `<copy>` is the identity.

### Examples

Move a single file (rename a file)

      <move file="file.orig" tofile="file.moved"/>

Move a single file to a directory

      <move file="file.orig" todir="dir/to/move/to"/>

Move a directory to a new directory

      <move todir="new/dir/to/move/to">
        <fileset dir="src/dir"/>
      </move>

Move a set of files to a new directory

      <move todir="some/new/dir" >
        <fileset dir="my/src/dir" >
          <include name="**/*.jar"/>
          <exclude name="**/ant.jar"/>
        </fileset>
      </move>

Append `".bak"` to the names of all files in a directory.

      <move todir="my/src/dir" >
        <fileset dir="my/src/dir" >
          <exclude name="**/*.bak"/>
        </fileset>
        <mapper type="glob" from="*" to="*.bak"/>
      </move>

Copyright © 2000,2001 Apache Software Foundation. All rights Reserved.