What/where is ...
Some context, earlier I was moving files and mistyped up a directory
mv <file> .. as mv <file .> and got the usual complaint ’ and are the same’.
so trying to fix it, I fat finger as
mv <file ...> no complaint and the file is gone, not up a directory, nor two or three (or anywhere up or down the tree. ... and it’s not an alias
Ideas?
Files with names starting with “.” are hidden, i.e. not shown with ls. Do “ls -la” And mv it to a normal name, “mv … something.xyz”
“…” has no special meaning in bash (or any shell)
Hey, sorry to bump this older thread 
. But I think this would help others too.
First, know that every directory in a linux/unix filesystem has a . and .. entry. . resolves to the current directory and .. resolves to the parent directory.
mv <file> . # attempts to move the file to the current directory
mv <file> .. # attempts to move the file to the parent directory
mv <file> ... # attempts to move the file to "..." in the **current** directory
Also, I tried to dig into the documentation myself. But . and .. are not shell extensions from bash. They go deeper than that, since they are a part of the Linux C interface. There are formal explanations in the path_resolution man page, if you have it.