'mv/cp commands not working as expected wih xargs in bash

Hi I have 2 parent directories with these contents, under /tmp:

directories

Note parent directory names have ";" in it- not recommended in Unix like systems, but those directories are pushed by an external application, and that's the way we have to deal with it.

I need to move these parent directories (along with their contents) to /tmp/archive - on a RHEL 7.9 (Maipo) machine

My simple code:

ARCHIVE="/tmp/archive"
[ -d "${ARCHIVE}" ] && mkdir -p "${ARCHIVE}"
ls -lrth /tmp | awk "\$NF ~ /2021-.*/{print \$NF}" | xargs -I "{}" mv "{}" ${ARCHIVE}/

But when I run this script, mv copies one of the parent directory as it is, but for the other one, it just moves the contents of the parent directory, not the directory itself:

enter image description here

I tried the same script with cp -pvr command in place of mv, and its the same behavior enter image description here

When I run the same script in a Ubuntu 18 system, the behavior is as expected i.e - the parent directories get moved to archive folder.

Step-1

Step-2

Step-3

Step-4

Why is there this difference in behavior between a Ubuntu and a RHEL system, for the same script

bashshxargscpmv


Solution 1:[1]

Try a simpler approach:

mkdir -p /tmp/archive
mv -v /tmp/2021-*\;*\;*/ /tmp/archive

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 pjh

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