Moving .png files with mv and wildcards error

Question

I've got a folder full of thousands of pictures. I want to move all of the .png files back one directory.. I tried

 mv -i *.png ../

But get the following error:

mv: invalid option -- 'p'
Try `mv --help' for more information.

Any advice?

Answer 1

in order to prevent mv from trying to interpret a file with a leading dash (e.g. -pbla.png) as an option (like -p bla.png), you can separate the flags from the files using a double dash --:

mv -i -- *.png ../

another simple way is to prefix the current path ./ to each filename:

mv -i ./*.png ../