Ray of Light wrote:

This would only get one layer of subdirectories.

The zsh has variable-depth wildcarding if extended globs are enabled (mv **/* .), but you will get funny results because it matches directories as well as files. Also, you will get "arg list too long" if the tree of is any real size. The job is often done with a find-xargs combo (which does many execs -- slow -- and fails on files with special characters in them) or a perl script.

It turns out that the easiest way to do it (in unix) is a zip-unzip combo with paths junked, which is basically what this guy (who isn't me) suggested.