$ cd /
$ ls
bin dev home lib64 mnt proc run srv tmp var
boot etc lib media opt root sbin sys usr
$ cd ETC
bash: cd: ETC: No such file or directory
$ pwd
/
$ cd etc
$ pwd
/etc
    

$ cd ~
$ pwd
/home/user
$ ls
Desktop Documents Downloads
$ mkdir linux_essentials-2.4
$ ls
Desktop Documents Downloads linux_essentials-2.4
$ cd linux_essentials-2.4
$ pwd
/home/user/linux_essentials-2.4
    

$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4
    

$ mkdir creating moving copying/files copying/directories deleting/directories deleting/files globs
    

$ mkdir -p creating moving copying/files copying/directories deleting/directories deleting/files globs
    

$ find
.
./creating
./moving
./globs
./copying
./copying/files
./copying/directories
./deleting
./deleting/directories
./deleting/files
    

$ cd ~
$ pwd
/home/user
$ ls
Desktop Documents Downloads
$ mkdir linux_essentials-2.4
$ ls
Desktop Documents Downloads linux_essentials-2.4
$ cd linux_essentials-2.4
$ pwd
/home/user/linux_essentials-2.4
    

$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4
    

$ mkdir creating moving copying/files copying/directories deleting/directories deleting/files globs
    

$ mkdir -p creating moving copying/files copying/directories deleting/directories deleting/files globs
    

$ find
.
./creating
./moving
./globs
./copying
./copying/files
./copying/directories
./deleting
./deleting/directories
./deleting/files
    

$ touch globs/question1 globs/question2012 globs/question23 globs/question13 globs/question14
$ touch globs/star10 globs/star1100 globs/star2002 globs/star2013
    

$ cd globs
$ ls
question1 question14 question23 star1100 star2013
question13 question2012 star10 star2002
    

$ cat question14
    

$ echo hello > question15
$ cat question15
hello
    

$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/moving
    

$ touch file1 file22
$ echo file3 > file3
$ echo file4 > file4
$ ls
file1 file22 file3 file4
    

$ mv file22 file2
$ ls
file1 file2 file3 file4
    

$ cat file3
file3
$ cat file4
file4
$ mv file4 file3
$ cat file3
file4
$ ls
file1 file2 file3
    

$ touch file4 file5
$ mv -i file4 file3
mv: overwrite ‘file3’? y
    

$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/moving
$ mkdir dir1 dir2
$ ls
dir1 dir2 file1 file2 file3 file5
    

$ mv file1 dir1
$ ls
dir1 dir2 file2 file3 file5
$ ls dir1
file1
    

$ mv file2 file3 dir2
$ ls
dir1 dir2 file5
$ ls dir2
file2 file3
    

$ ls
dir1 dir2 file5
$ ls dir1
file1
$ mv dir1 dir3
$ ls
dir2 dir3 file5
$ ls dir3
file1
    

$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/moving
$ ls
dir2 dir3 file5
$ rmdir file5
rmdir: failed to remove ‘file5’: Not a directory
$ rm file5
$ ls
dir2 dir3
    

$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/
$ ls
copying creating deleting globs moving
$ rmdir deleting
rmdir: failed to remove ‘deleting’: Directory not empty
$ ls -l deleting
total 0
drwxrwxr-x. 2 user user 6 Mar 26 14:58 directories
drwxrwxr-x. 2 user user 6 Mar 26 14:58 files
    

$ ls -a deleting/files
. ..
$ rmdir deleting/files
$ ls -l deleting
directories
    

$ ls
copying creating deleting globs moving
$ rm deleting
rm: cannot remove ‘deleting’: Is a directory
$ ls -l deleting
total 0
drwxrwxr-x. 2 user user 6 Mar 26 14:58 directories
$ rm -r deleting
$ ls
copying creating globs moving
    

$ find
.
./creating
./moving
./moving/dir2
./moving/dir2/file2
./moving/dir2/file3
./moving/dir3
./moving/dir3/file1
./globs
./globs/question1
./globs/question2012
./globs/question23
./globs/question13
./globs/question14
./globs/star10
./globs/star1100
./globs/star2002
./globs/star2013
./globs/question15
./copying
./copying/files
./copying/directories
$ rm -ri moving
rm: descend into directory ‘moving’? y
rm: descend into directory ‘moving/dir2’? y
rm: remove regular empty file ‘moving/dir2/file2’? y
rm: remove regular empty file ‘moving/dir2/file3’? y
rm: remove directory ‘moving/dir2’? y
rm: descend into directory ‘moving/dir3’? y
rm: remove regular empty file ‘moving/dir3/file1’? y
rm: remove directory ‘moving/dir3’? y
rm: remove directory ‘moving’? y
    

$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/copying
$ ls
directories files
$ cp /etc/nsswitch.conf files/nsswitch.conf
$ cp /etc/issue /etc/hostname files
    

$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/copying/files
$ ls
hostname issue nsswitch.conf
$ cat hostname
mycomputer
$ cat issue
Debian GNU/Linux 9 \n \l
$ cp hostname issue
$ cat issue
mycomputer
    

$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/copying
$ cp files directories
cp: omitting directory ‘files’
    

$ cp -r files files2
$ find
.
./files
./files/nsswitch.conf
./files/fstab
./files/hostname
./directories
./directories/files
./directories/files/nsswitch.conf
./directories/files/fstab
./directories/files/hostname
./files2
./files2/nsswitch.conf
./files2/fstab
./files2/hostname
    

$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/globs
$ ls
question1 question14 question2012 star10 star2002
question13 question15 question23 star1100 star2013
$ ls star1*
star10 star1100
$ ls star*
star10 star1100 star2002 star2013
$ ls star2*
star2002 star2013
$ ls star2*2
star2002
$ ls star2013*
star2013
    

$ ls star*
    

$ ls star10 star1100 star2002 star2013
    

$ ls
question1 question14 question2012 star10 star2002
question13 question15 question23 star1100 star2013
$ ls question?
question1
$ ls question1?
question13 question14 question15
$ ls question?3
question13 question23
    

$ mkdir brackets
$ cd brackets
$ touch file1 file2 file3 file4 filea fileb filec file5 file6 file7
$ ls file[1-2]
file1 file2
$ ls file[1-3]
file1 file2 file3
    

$ ls file[1-35-6a-c]
file1 file2 file3 file5 file6 filea fileb filec
    

$ ls file[^a]
file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 file6 file7 fileb filec
    

$ ls file[[:digit:]]
file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 file6 file7
$ touch file1a file11
$ ls file[[:digit:]a]
file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 file6 file7 filea
$ ls file[[:digit:]]a
file1a
    

Introduction
This lesson covers managing files and directories on Linux using command line tools.
A file is a collection of data with a name and set of attributes. If, for example, you were to transfer
some photos from your phone to a computer and give them descriptive names, you would now have
a bunch of image files on your computer. These files have attributes such as the time the file was last
accessed or modified.
A directory is a special kind of file used to organize files. A good way to think of directories is like
the file folders used to organize papers in a file cabinet. Unlike paper file folders, you can easily put
directories inside of other directories.
The command line is the most effective way to manage files on a Linux system. The shell and
command line tools have features that make using the command line faster and easier than a
graphical file manager.
In this section you will use the commands ls, mv, cp, pwd, find, touch, rm, rmdir, echo, cat, and mkdir
to manage and organize files and directories.
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Case Sensitivity
Unlike Microsoft Windows, file and directory names on Linux systems are case sensitive. This means
that the names /etc/ and /ETC/ are different directories. Try the following commands:
$ cd /
$ ls
bin dev home lib64 mnt proc run srv tmp var
boot etc lib media opt root sbin sys usr
$ cd ETC
bash: cd: ETC: No such file or directory
$ pwd
/
$ cd etc
$ pwd
/etc
The pwd shows you the directory you are currently in. As you can see, changing to /ETC did not
work as there is no such directory. Changing into the directory /etc which exists, did succeed.
Creating Directories
The mkdir command is used to create directories.
Let’s create a new directory within our home directory:
$ cd ~
$ pwd
/home/user
$ ls
Desktop Documents Downloads
$ mkdir linux_essentials-2.4
$ ls
Desktop Documents Downloads linux_essentials-2.4
$ cd linux_essentials-2.4
$ pwd
/home/emma/linux_essentials-2.4
For the duration of this lesson, all commands will take place within this directory or in one of its
subdirectories.
To easily return to the lesson directory from any other position in your file system, you can use the
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command:
$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4
The shell interprets the ~ character as your home directory.
When you’re in the lesson directory, create some more directories which we will use for the
exercises. You can add all the directory names, separated by spaces, to mkdir:
$ mkdir creating moving copying/files copying/directories deleting/directories
deleting/files globs
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘copying/files’: No such file or directory
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘copying/directories’: No such file or directory
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘deleting/directories’: No such file or directory
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘deleting/files’: No such file or directory
$ ls
creating globs moving
Notice the error message and that only moving, globs, and creating were created. The copying and
deleting directories don’t exist yet. mkdir, by default, won’t create a directory inside of a directory
that does not exist. The -p or –parents option instructs mkdir to create parent directories if they do
not exist. Try the same mkdir command with the -p option:
$ mkdir -p creating moving copying/files copying/directories deleting/directories
deleting/files globs
Now you don’t get any error messages. Let’s see which directories exist now:
$ find
.
./creating
./moving
./globs
./copying
./copying/files
./copying/directories
./deleting
./deleting/directories
./deleting/files
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The find program is usually used to search for files and directories, but without any options, it will
show you a listing of all the files, directories, and sub-directories of your current directory.
TIP
When listing the contents of a directory with ls, the -t and -r options are
particularly handy. They sort the output by time (-t) and reverse the sorting order (-
r). In this case, the newest files will be at the bottom of the output.
Creating Files
Typically, files will be created by the programs that work with the data stored in the files. An empty
file can be created using the touch command. If you run touch on an existing file, the file’s contents
won’t be changed, but the files modification timestamp will be updated.
Run the following command to create some files for the globbing lesson:
$ touch globs/question1 globs/question2012 globs/question23 globs/question13
globs/question14
$ touch globs/star10 globs/star1100 globs/star2002 globs/star2013
Now let’s verify all files exist in the globs directory:
$ cd globs
$ ls
question1 question14 question23 star1100 star2013
question13 question2012 star10 star2002
Notice how touch created the files? You can view the contents of a text file with the cat command.
Try it on one of the files you just created:
$ cat question14
Since touch creates empty files, you should get no output. You can use echo with > to create simple
text files. Try it:
$ echo hello > question15
$ cat question15
hello
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echo displays text on the command line. The > character instructs the shell to write output of a
command to the specified file instead of your terminal. This leads to the output of echo, hello in this
case, being written to the file question15. This isn’t specific to echo, it can be used with any
command.
WARNING Be careful when using >! If the named file already exists, it will be
overwritten!
Renaming Files
Files are moved and renamed with the mv command.
Set your working directory to the moving directory:
$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/moving
Create some files to practice with. By now, you should already be familiar with these commands:
$ touch file1 file22
$ echo file3 > file3
$ echo file4 > file4
$ ls
file1 file22 file3 file4
Suppose file22 is a typo and should be file2. Fix it with the mv command. When renaming a file,
the first argument is the current name, the second is the new name:
$ mv file22 file2
$ ls
file1 file2 file3 file4
Be careful with the mv command. If you rename a file to the name of an existing file, it will overwrite
it. Let’s test this with file3 and file4:
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$ cat file3
file3
$ cat file4
file4
$ mv file4 file3
$ cat file3
file4
$ ls
file1 file2 file3
Notice how the contents of file3 is now file4. Use the -i option to make mv prompt you if you are
about to overwrite an existing file. Try it:
$ touch file4 file5
$ mv -i file4 file3
mv: overwrite ‘file3’? y
Moving Files
Files are moved from one directory to another with the mv command.
Create a few directories to move files into:
$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/moving
$ mkdir dir1 dir2
$ ls
dir1 dir2 file1 file2 file3 file5
Move file1 into dir1:
$ mv file1 dir1
$ ls
dir1 dir2 file2 file3 file5
$ ls dir1
file1
Notice how the last argument to mv is the destination directory. Whenever the last argument to mv is
a directory, files are moved into it. Multiple files can be specified in a single mv command:
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$ mv file2 file3 dir2
$ ls
dir1 dir2 file5
$ ls dir2
file2 file3
It is also possible to use mv to move and rename directories. Rename dir1 to dir3:
$ ls
dir1 dir2 file5
$ ls dir1
file1
$ mv dir1 dir3
$ ls
dir2 dir3 file5
$ ls dir3
file1
Deleting Files and Directories
The rm command can delete files and directories, while the rmdir command can only delete
directories. Let’s clean up the moving directory by deleting file5:
$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/moving
$ ls
dir2 dir3 file5
$ rmdir file5
rmdir: failed to remove ‘file5’: Not a directory
$ rm file5
$ ls
dir2 dir3
By default rmdir can only delete empty directories, therefore we had to use rm to delete a regular file.
Try to delete the deleting directory:
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$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/
$ ls
copying creating deleting globs moving
$ rmdir deleting
rmdir: failed to remove ‘deleting’: Directory not empty
$ ls -l deleting
total 0
drwxrwxr-x. 2 emma emma 6 Mar 26 14:58 directories
drwxrwxr-x. 2 emma emma 6 Mar 26 14:58 files
By default, rmdir refuses to delete a directory that is not empty. Use rmdir to remove one of the
empty subdirectories of the deleting directory:
$ ls -a deleting/files
. ..
$ rmdir deleting/files
$ ls -l deleting
directories
Deleting large numbers of files or deep directory structures with many subdirectories may seem
tedious, but it is actually easy. By default, rm only works on regular files. The -r option is used to
override this behavior. Be careful, rm -r is an excellent foot gun! When you use the -r option, rm
will not only delete any directories, but everything within that directory, including subdirectories
and their contents. See for yourself how rm -r works:
$ ls
copying creating deleting globs moving
$ rm deleting
rm: cannot remove ‘deleting’: Is a directory
$ ls -l deleting
total 0
drwxrwxr-x. 2 emma emma 6 Mar 26 14:58 directories
$ rm -r deleting
$ ls
copying creating globs moving
Notice how deleting is gone, even tough it was not empty? Like mv, rm has a -i option to prompt
you before doing anything. Use rm -ri to remove directories from moving section that are no longer
needed:
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$ find
.
./creating
./moving
./moving/dir2
./moving/dir2/file2
./moving/dir2/file3
./moving/dir3
./moving/dir3/file1
./globs
./globs/question1
./globs/question2012
./globs/question23
./globs/question13
./globs/question14
./globs/star10
./globs/star1100
./globs/star2002
./globs/star2013
./globs/question15
./copying
./copying/files
./copying/directories
$ rm -ri moving
rm: descend into directory ‘moving’? y
rm: descend into directory ‘moving/dir2’? y
rm: remove regular empty file ‘moving/dir2/file2’? y
rm: remove regular empty file ‘moving/dir2/file3’? y
rm: remove directory ‘moving/dir2’? y
rm: descend into directory ‘moving/dir3’? y
rm: remove regular empty file ‘moving/dir3/file1’? y
rm: remove directory ‘moving/dir3’? y
rm: remove directory ‘moving’? y
Copying Files and Directories
The cp command is used to copy files and directories. Copy a few files into the copying directory:
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$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/copying
$ ls
directories files
$ cp /etc/nsswitch.conf files/nsswitch.conf
$ cp /etc/issue /etc/hostname files
If the last argument is a directory, cp will create a copy of the previous arguments inside the
directory. Like mv, multiple files can be specified at once, as long as the target is a directory.
When both operands of cp are files and both files exist, cp overwrites the second file with a copy of
the first file. Let’s practice this by overwrite the issue file with the hostname file:
$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/copying/files
$ ls
hostname issue nsswitch.conf
$ cat hostname
mycomputer
$ cat issue
Debian GNU/Linux 9 \n \l
$ cp hostname issue
$ cat issue
mycomputer
Now let’s try to create a copy of the files directory within the directories directory:
$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/copying
$ cp files directories
cp: omitting directory ‘files’
As you can see, cp by default only works on individual files. To copy a directory, you use the -r
option. Keep in mind that the -r option will cause cp to also copy the contents of the directory you
are copying:
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$ cp -r files directories
$ find
.
./files
./files/nsswitch.conf
./files/fstab
./files/hostname
./directories
./directories/files
./directories/files/nsswitch.conf
./directories/files/fstab
./directories/files/hostname
Notice how when an existing directory was used as the destination, cp creates a copy of the source
directory inside of it? If the destination doesn’t exist, it will create it and fill it with the contents of
the source directory:
$ cp -r files files2
$ find
.
./files
./files/nsswitch.conf
./files/fstab
./files/hostname
./directories
./directories/files
./directories/files/nsswitch.conf
./directories/files/fstab
./directories/files/hostname
./files2
./files2/nsswitch.conf
./files2/fstab
./files2/hostname
Globbing
What is commonly referred to as globbing is a simple pattern matching language. Command line
shells on Linux systems use this language to refer to groups of files whose names match a specific
pattern. POSIX.1-2017 specifies the following pattern matching characters:
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*
Matches any number of any character, including no characters
?
Matches any one character
[]
Matches a class of characters
In English, this means you can tell your shell to match a pattern instead of a literal string of text.
Usually Linux users specify multiple files with a glob instead of typing out each file name. Run the
following commands:
$ cd ~/linux_essentials-2.4/globs
$ ls
question1 question14 question2012 star10 star2002
question13 question15 question23 star1100 star2013
$ ls star1*
star10 star1100
$ ls star*
star10 star1100 star2002 star2013
$ ls star2*
star2002 star2013
$ ls star2*2
star2002
$ ls star2013*
star2013
The shell expands * to any number of anything, so your shell interprets star* to mean anything in
the relevant context that starts with star. When you run the command ls star*, your shell doesn’t
run the ls program with an argument of star*, it looks for files in the current directory that match
the pattern star* (including just star), and turns each file matching the pattern into an argument to
ls:
$ ls star*
as far as ls is concerned is the equivalent of
$ ls star10 star1100 star2002 star2013
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The * character doesn’t mean anything to ls. To prove this, run the following command:
$ ls star\*
ls: cannot access star*: No such file or directory
When you precede a character with a \, you are instructing your shell not to interpret it. In this case,
you want ls to have an argument of star* instead of what the glob star* expands to.
The ? expands to any single character. Try the following commands to see for yourself:
$ ls
question1 question14 question2012 star10 star2002
question13 question15 question23 star1100 star2013
$ ls question?
question1
$ ls question1?
question13 question14 question15
$ ls question?3
question13 question23
$ ls question13?
ls: cannot access question13?: No such file or directory
The [] brackets are used to match ranges or classes of characters. The [] brackets work like they do
in POSIX regular expressions except with globs the ^ is used instead of !.
Create some files to experiment with:
$ mkdir brackets
$ cd brackets
$ touch file1 file2 file3 file4 filea fileb filec file5 file6 file7
Ranges within [] brackets are expressed using a -:
$ ls
file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 file6 file7 filea fileb filec
$ ls file[1-2]
file1 file2
$ ls file[1-3]
file1 file2 file3
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Multiple ranges can be specified:
$ ls file[1-25-7]
file1 file2 file5 file6 file7
$ ls file[1-35-6a-c]
file1 file2 file3 file5 file6 filea fileb filec
Square brackets can also be used to match a specific set of characters.
$ ls file[1a5]
file1 file5 filea
You can also use the ^ character as the first character to match everything except certain characters.
$ ls file[^a]
file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 file6 file7 fileb filec
The last thing we will cover in this lesson is character classes. To match a character class, you use
[:classname:]. For example, to use the digit class, which matches numerals, you would do
something like this:
$ ls file[[:digit:]]
file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 file6 file7
$ touch file1a file11
$ ls file[[:digit:]a]
file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 file6 file7 filea
$ ls file[[:digit:]]a
file1a
The glob file[[:digit:]a], matches file followed by a digit or a.
The character classes supported depends on your current locale. POSIX requires the following
character classes for all locales:
[:alnum:]
Letters and numbers.
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[:alpha:]
Upper or lowercase letters.
[:blank:]
Spaces and tabs.
[:cntrl:]
Control characters, e.g. backspace, bell, NAK, escape.
[:digit:]
Numerals (0123456789).
[:graph:]
Graphic characters (all characters except ctrl and the space character)
[:lower:]
Lowercase letters (a-z).
[:print:]
Printable characters (alnum, punct, and the space character).
[:punct:]
Punctuation characters, i.e. !, &, “.
[:space:]
Whitespace characters, e.g. tabs, spaces, newlines.
[:upper:]
Uppercase letters (A-Z).
[:xdigit:]
Hexadecimal numerals (usually 0123456789abcdefABCDEF).
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Guided Exercises
1. Given the following, select the directories that would be created by the command mkdir -p
/tmp/outfiles/text/today /tmp/infiles/text/today
$ pwd
/tmp
$ find
.
./outfiles
./outfiles/text
/tmp
/tmp/outfiles
/tmp/outfiles/text
/tmp/outfiles/text/today
/tmp/infiles
/tmp/infiles/text
/tmp/infiles/text/today
2. What does -v do for mkdir, rm, and cp?
3. What happens if you accidentally attempt to copy three files on the same command line to a file
that already exists instead of a directory?
4. What happens when you use mv to move a directory into itself?
5. How would you delete all files in your current directory that start with old?
6. Which of the following files would log_[a-z]_201?_*_01.txt match?
log_3_2017_Jan_01.txt
log_+_2017_Feb_01.txt
log_b_2007_Mar_01.txt
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log_f_201A_Wednesday_01.txt
7. Create a few globs to match the following list of file names:
doc100
doc200
doc301
doc401
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Explorational Exercises
1. Use the cp man page to find out how to make a copy of a file and have the permissions and
modification time match the original.
2. What does the rmdir -p command do? Experiment with it and explain how it differs from rm -r.
3. DO NOT ACTUALLY EXECUTE THIS COMMAND: What do you think rm -ri /* will do?
(HONESTLY, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO DO THIS!)
4. Other than using -i, is it possible to prevent mv from overwriting destination files?
5. Explain the command cp -u.
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Summary
The Linux command line environment provides tools to manage files. Some commonly used ones are
cp, mv, mkdir, rm, and rmdir. These tools, combined with globs, allow users to get a lot of work done
very quickly.
Many commands have a -i option, which prompts you before doing anything. Prompting can save
you a lot of hassle if you mistyped something.
A lot of commands have a -r option. The -r option usually means recursion. In mathematics and
computer science, a recursive function is a function using itself in its definition. When it comes to
command line tools, it usually means apply the command to a directory and everything in it.
Commands used in this lesson:
cat
Read and output the contents of a file.
cp
Copy files or directories.
echo
Output a string.
find
Traverse a file system tree and search for files matching a specific set of criteria.
ls
Show properties of files and directories and list a directory’s contents.
mkdir
Create new directories.
mv
Move or rename files or directories.
pwd
Output the current working directory.
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rm
Delete files or directories.
rmdir
Delete directories.
touch
Create new empty files or update an existing file’s modification timestamp.
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Answers to Guided Exercises
1. Given the following, select the directories that would be created by the command mkdir -p
/tmp/outfiles/text/today /tmp/infiles/text/today
$ pwd
/tmp
$ find
.
./outfiles
./outfiles/text
The marked directories would be created. The directories /tmp, /tmp/outfiles, and
/tmp/outfiles/text already exist, so mkdir will ignore them.
/tmp
/tmp/outfiles
/tmp/outfiles/text
/tmp/outfiles/text/today X
/tmp/infiles X
/tmp/infiles/text X
/tmp/infiles/text/today X
2. What does -v do for mkdir, rm, and cp?
Typically -v turns on verbose output. It causes the respective programs to output what they are
doing as they are doing it:
$ rm -v a b
removed ‘a’
removed ‘b’
$ mv -v a b
‘a’ -> ‘b’
$ cp -v b c
‘b’ -> ‘c’
3. What happens if you accidentally attempt to copy three files on the same command line to a file
that already exists instead of a directory?
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cp will refuse to do anything and output an error message:
$ touch a b c d
$ cp a b c d
cp: target ‘d’ is not a directory
4. What happens when you use mv to move a directory into itself?
You will get an error message telling you mv cannot do that.
$ mv a a
mv: cannot move ‘a’ to a subdirectory of itself, ‘a/a’
5. How would you delete all files in your current directory that start with old?
You would use the glob old* with rm:
$ rm old*
6. Which of the following files would log_[a-z]_201?_*_01.txt match?
log_3_2017_Jan_01.txt
log_+_2017_Feb_01.txt
log_b_2007_Mar_01.txt
log_f_201A_Wednesday_01.txt X
$ ls log_[a-z]_201?_*_01.txt
log_f_201A_Wednesday_01.txt
log_[a-z] matches log_ followed by any lower case letter, so both
log_f_201A_Wednesday_01.txt and log_b_2007_Mar_01.txt match. _201? matches any single
character, so only log_f_201A_Wednesday_01.txt matches. Finally *_01.txt matches anything
that ends with _01.txt, so our remaining option matches.
7. Create a few globs to match the following list of file names:
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doc100
doc200
doc301
doc401
There are several solutions. Here are some of them:
doc*
doc[1-4]*
doc?0?
doc[1-4]0?
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Answers to Explorational Exercises
1. Use the cp man page to find out how to make a copy of a file and have the permissions and
modification time match the original.
You would use the -p option. From the man page:
$ man cp
-p same as –preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps
–preserve[=ATTR_LIST]
preserve the specified attributes (default: mode,ownership,time‐
stamps), if possible additional attributes: context, links,
xattr, all
2. What does the rmdir -p option do? Experiment with it and explain how it differs from rm -r.
It causes rmdir to behave similarly to mkdir -p. If passed a tree of empty directories, it will
remove all of them.
$ find
.
./a
./a/b
./a/b/c
$ rmdir -p a/b/c
$ ls
3. DO NOT ACTUALLY EXECUTE THIS COMMAND: What do you think rm -ri /* will do?
(HONESTLY, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO DO THIS!)
It will remove all files and directories writable by your user account. This includes any network
file systems.
4. Other than using -i, is it possible to prevent mv from overwriting destination files?
Yes, the -n or –no-clobber option prevents mv from overwriting files.
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$ cat a
a
$ cat b
b
$ mv -n a b
$ cat b
b
5. Explain cp -u.
The -u option causes cp to only copy a file if the destination is missing or is older than the
source file.
$ ls -l
total 24K
drwxr-xr-x 123 emma student 12K Feb 2 05:34 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 emma student 4.0K Feb 2 06:56 .
-rw-r–r– 1 emma student 2 Feb 2 06:56 a
-rw-r–r– 1 emma student 2 Feb 2 07:00 b
$ cat a
a
$ cat b
b
$ cp -u a b
$ cat b
b
$ cp -u a c
$ ls -l
total 12
-rw-r–r– 1 emma student 2 Feb 2 06:56 a
-rw-r–r– 1 emma student 2 Feb 2 07:00 b
-rw-r–r– 1 emma student 2 Feb 2 07:00 c