How to use 'mv' command to move files except those in a specific directory?

Since find does have an exclude option, use find + xargs + mv:

find /source/directory -name ignore-directory-name -prune -print0 | xargs -0 mv --target-directory=/target/directory

Note that this is almost copied from the find man page (I think using mv --target-directory is better than cpio).

Lets's assume the dir structure is like,

|parent
    |--child1
    |--child2
    |--grandChild1
    |--grandChild2
    |--grandChild3
    |--grandChild4
    |--grandChild5
    |--grandChild6

And we need to move files so that it would appear like,

|parent
    |--child1
    |   |--grandChild1
    |   |--grandChild2
    |   |--grandChild3
    |   |--grandChild4
    |   |--grandChild5
    |   |--grandChild6
    |--child2

In this case, you need to exclude two directories child1 and child2, and move rest of the directories in to child1 directory.

use,

mv !(child1|child2) child1

This will move all of rest of the directories into child1 directory.

This isn't exactly what you asked for, but it might do the job:

mv the-folder-you-want-to-exclude somewhere-outside-of-the-main-tree
mv the-tree where-you-want-it
mv the-excluded-folder original-location

(Essentially, move the excluded folder out of the larger tree to be moved.)

So, if I have a/ and I want to exclude a/b/c/*:

mv a/b/c ../c
mv a final_destination
mkdir -p a/b
mv ../c a/b/c

Or something like that. Otherwise, you might be able to get find to help you.

First get the names of files and folders and exclude whichever you want:

ls --ignore=file1 --ignore==folder1 --ignore==regular-expression1 ...

Then pass filtered names to mv as the first parameter and the second parameter will be the destination:

mv $(ls --ignore=file1 --ignore==folder1 --ignore==regular-expression1 ...) destination/