When we use mv command, what changes take place in HDD?

Under following conditions-

mv within the same HDD partition
mv to a different partition in the same HDD
mv to a different device (e.g. USB HDD)

Is the complete file moved or is it a very small change like some pointer reassignment ?

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Answers:

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Method 1

It’s up to each filesystem how to handle a move within the filesystem (also known as renaming a file), but filesystems pretty much universally handle it by updating directory entries without moving the inode or file contents.

A move between filesystems (it doesn’t matter if it’s on the same physical medium or not) is handled as a file copy followed by a delete. This is in fact exactly what the mv command does. Obviously that means that the destination filesystem has to make a new copy of the file.

Method 2

man mv says:

 As the rename(2) call does not work across file systems, mv uses cp(1) and rm(1) to
 accomplish the move.  The effect is equivalent to:

       rm -f destination_path && 
       cp -pRP source_file destination && 
       rm -rf source_file

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

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