How do I move a file to a directory?
Author: Deron Eriksson
Description: This Java tutorial describes how to move a file to a directory using Commons IO.
Tutorial created using: Windows XP || JDK 1.5.0_09 || Eclipse Web Tools Platform 2.0 (Eclipse 3.3.0)


The moveFileToDirectory() method of the FileUtils class of the ApacheSW Commons IOS library can be used to move a file to a directory. It takes the source file as its first argument. It takes the destination directory as its second argument. It takes a boolean as its third argument, which specifies if the destination directory should be created if it doesn't already exist.

The MoveFileToDirectoryTest class demonstrates this.

MoveFileToDirectoryTest.java

package test;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;

import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils;

public class MoveFileToDirectoryTest {

	public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

		File sourceFile = new File("directory-source/test1.txt");
		File destinationDir = new File("directory-destination");

		FileUtils.moveFileToDirectory(sourceFile, destinationDir, true);

	}

}

Before MoveFileToDirectoryTest is run, we can see that the test1.txt file exists in the directory-source directory.

test1.txt in directory-source

After MoveFileToDirectoryTest is executed, we can see that the directory-destination directory has been created and that the test1.txt file has been moved to this directory. The directory-source directory is now empty.

test1.txt in newly created directory-destination