Question

If the destination file does not exists, then mv command creates it.

(a) True

(b) False

I have been asked this question at a job interview.

My enquiry is from Deleting and Renaming files: rm and mv Command topic in portion Handling Ordinary Files of Unix

Answer 1

Right answer is (a) True

To elaborate: If the destination file specified in the mv command does not exists it will be simply created. For example, if in the command mv  file1  file2, if file2 does not exists then it will be created. Now file1 will be known as filename ‘file2’.