Tutorial 2 - Playing With Files and Directories

In this tutorial, lets have a look at some commands to play around with the files and directories.

6. touch - This command is used to create empty text files. You can also create multiple files in a single command.

Eg. touch test1

touch test2 test3

From the above result set it is clear that touch command created a file called test1 in the present working directory.

*** ls is used to list the files in directory. This would be discussed later.

7. mkdir - This command is used to create a folder in present working directory.

Eg. mkdir Test1

It will create a folder Test1 in the present working directory.

If you want to create the folder at any other location then you have to specify the path accordingly.

Eg. mkdir Documents/Test2

This command will create a Test2 folder in Documents folder.

8. cd - cd command is used to change the directory.

Eg. cd Test1

It will change the present working directory to home/Aditya/Test1

9. cat - cat command can be used to create a test file and add content to it. Also, it can be used to read the contents of an already existing text file. However, you have to use the > and  < operators to use this command.

Eg. cat > test1

When cat command is used with a greater than symbol followed by a file name, it allows you to add the contents to that file. As displayed in above example, we added the content to file test1. In order to save the content and get back to $ prompt, you have to use the keyword combination Ctrl+D.

In order to read the contents of a file you have to use < sign.

Eg. cat < test1

cat command can also be used to merge the contents of two files.

Eg. cat > test1

This is test1.

cat > test2

This is test2.

cat test1 test2 > test3

10. mv - mv command is used to rename a file or a folder.

Eg. mv test newtest

The above command renames a file called test with a new name called newtest.

You can see from the above screenshot that the file called test has been renamed as newtest.

11. rm - rm command is used to remove the files or directories.

Eg. rm test1

In above example, rm removes a file called test1.

However, in order to remove a directory we have to use rm with -r.

Eg. rm -r testdir

In above example we created a directory called testdir and tried removing is with rm without using -r. we got an error message. Later we tried to remove the same directory using rm with -r, then we successfully removed testdir.

12. rmdir - This works same as that of rm -r.

Eg. rmdir testdir

As seen above rmdir and rm -r produces same result.