EXCH(1)

💫 EXCH(1) — like, the exch page, bestie 💫

User Commands ✨ it's giving "tiny command, huge power" ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

exch — atomically exchanges paths between two files

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

exch oldpath newpath

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so listen. exch atomically exchanges oldpath and newpath. that's it, that's the whole job, and it does it flawlessly.

the way it works is that exch is a simple command wrapping RENAME_EXCHANGE of the renameat2 system call. so it's not out here doing something cursed and homemade — it's just a cute lil wrapper around the real syscall. iconic behavior, honestly. 🫶

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -h, --help — shows you the help text and then dips. 🎀
• -V, --version — shows you the version and then dips. 🌈

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👑 EXIT STATUS 👑

exch has these exit status values, and yes we're going to go through all of them:

• 0 — success 💅 (we love to see it)
• 1 — unspecified failure 😭 (ngl, "unspecified" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here)

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🧚 AUTHORS 🧚

Masatake YAMATO <yamato@redhat.com> — thank you for your service, legend 🫡💜

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🍓 SEE ALSO 🍓

• renameat2(2)

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💀 REPORTING BUGS 💀

found a bug? don't suffer in silence, bestie. for bug reports, use the issue tracker: https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues

fr fr, they want to know. the issue tracker is literally right there. 🙈

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⭐ AVAILABILITY ⭐

the exch command is part of the util-linux package, which you can download from the Linux Kernel Archive: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/ 🌸

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this one came from util-linux 2.42.4, dated 2026-09-21. go swap some paths, you absolute main character 👑✨💖