Editing the Unix Tree

Make sure to run all of the copy commands below, as we'll be using files from the Ostrom server later in the course.

• mkdir

  • This command name stands for "make a directory".

  • It creates a new folder (or directory). If no path is specified, the new directory is created in the current directory.

# start in your home directory
cd ~

# create a directory named "unixclass"
# with a subdirectory named "testdir"
mkdir unixclass
mkdir unixclass/testdir

# change current directory directly to "testdir"
cd unixclass/testdir 

# go to the parent directory (i.e. unixclass)
# and print the working directory
cd ..
pwd

• touch

  • This command creates an empty file with the given name.

# Go to /home/<your username>/unixclass
cd ~/unixclass

# Create an empty file named "hello.txt"
touch hello.txt

# List the files in the directory to verify that worked
ls

• cp and mv

  • These commands stand for "copy" and "move," respectively.

  • They copy / move files and directories to the specified location.

  • Wildcards symbols such as "*" or "?" are commonly used to copy multiple files with a single command.

    • The symbol "*" stands for any number of alphanumeric characters.

    • The symbol "?" stands for a single alphanumeric character.

# Start in ~/unixclass
cd ~/unixclass

# copy the file named arrayDat.txt into your unix_class directory
cp /net/ostrom/data/dropbox/arrayDat.txt .
ls

# copy all the files with suffix "array”
# into the current directory 
cp /net/ostrom/data/dropbox/array* .
ls

# copy any file whose extension is "txt" 
cp /net/ostrom/data/dropbox/*.txt .
ls

# copy all files
cp /net/ostrom/data/dropbox/* .
ls

• rmdir and rm

  • rmdir only removes empty directories, rm removes both directories and files.

  • rm needs -r flag to remove directories.

# Start in ~/unixclass
cd ~/unixclass

# Create a temporary directory
mkdir trash

# create copies of arrayDat.txt in the temporary directory
cp arrayDat.txt trash/arrayDat1.txt
cp arrayDat.txt trash/arrayDat2.txt
cp arrayDat.txt trash/arrayDat3.txt
cp arrayDat.txt trash/arrayDat4.txt

ls trash

# Try to delete the directory with `rmdir`
rmdir trash

# Try to delete the directory with `rm -r`
rm -r trash