How do I delete a folder but not the contents?

My directory (in Linux) looks like com/com/{various,files} where com and com are folders of the same name and the second com holds the various files. I want the first com removed, but the second and files in the second kept.

Answers:

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Method 1

Rename the outer directory out of the way, move the inner one to the name you want, and then delete the (now empty) outer directory:

$ mv com to-delete
$ mv to-delete/com com
$ rmdir to-delete

You could also mv com/com/* com and remove the inner directory, if you don’t have too many files and none of them are dotfiles, but the above is more general and more efficient.

Method 2

The only way to accomplish this is to move the “various files” up a level and then remove the second “com” directory.

Example

$ mv com/com/(various files) com/.
$ rmdir com/com

Method 3

So here you have this all in one:-

mv com/com/ SOME-TEMPORARY-NAME ; rm -rf com ; mv SOME-TEMPORARY-NAME com

The ; simply lets you run all the commands in one go.

And then I have used rm -rf so that even if you have any other files inside com/ all will be removed without user-interaction.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0