shutil.move()

shutil.move(src, dst, copy_function=copy2)

Recursively move a file or directory (src) to another location (dst) and return the destination.

If the destination is an existing directory, then src is moved inside that directory. If the destination already exists but is not a directory, it may be overwritten depending on os.rename() semantics.

If the destination is on the current filesystem, then os.rename() is used. Otherwise, src is copied to dst using copy_function and then removed. In case of symlinks, a new symlink pointing to the target of src will be created in or as dst and src will be removed.

If copy_function is given, it must be a callable that takes two arguments src and dst, and will be used to copy src to dest if os.rename() cannot be used. If the source is a directory, copytree() is called, passing it the copy_function(). The default copy_function is copy2(). Using copy() as the copy_function allows the move to succeed when it is not possible to also copy the metadata, at the expense of not copying any of the metadata.