Making Files and Directories

Before we make our first directory and file lets get a few useful tips for the names of your files.

Complicated names of files and directories can make our lives painful when working on the command-line. Many characters have special meanings on the command-line. We already mentioned some and we will learn some more of them during this course. There are special characters that can cause your command to not work as expected and can even result in data loss.

As we learned before Unix commands treat names starting with - as command options, and . in front of the filename makes it invisible. Spaces can make a name more meaningful, but since spaces are used to separate arguments on the command-line it is better to avoid them in names of files and directories. If you use Space in a file/directory name, you will have to treat every space as a special character. E.g. if we named our directory as my first dir in order to access it we would have to type my\ first\ dir to access it, or we can surround the name in quotes "my first dir". We can also let the Tab auto-completion do the work for us if there are no other files/directories with a similar name. Instead of Space, we can use - or _ instead.

Making directories mkdir

Let's create a new directory in our home directory (~) called my_first_dir using the command mkdir.

cd ~
mkdir my_first_dir 

Once you made it, do ls to check if it is there.

Making files nano, touch

There are many ways to make a file. Here we will only give some examples.

nano

nano is a command-line text editor and we can use it to modify and create text files. Type nano in your command-line:

nano 

Ok, don't get afraid. Now we are inside nano and you can see basic commands at the bottom of the window.

Here are some of the useful nano commands:

Now let's type something (e.g. "Can't wait for quarantine to end") and press Ctrl+X. This will close the file, but nano will offer us to save it. When nano asks as if we want to save it we have to press Y, and then nano will ask as for "File Name to Write:". Let's name it as my_first_file.txt. After you typed it just press Enter and the file will be saved. Check if it is there with command ls.

Let's open the file we just created.

nano my_first_file.txt

Let's type in a bit of text (e.g. "4 real"). Once we're happy with our text, we can press Ctrl+O to save it. We'll be asked "File Name to Write:" and we can just press the Enter and use already existing name my_first_file.txt, or we can make a modified copy by giving it a new name. After we are done we can close nano as before with Ctrl+X.

touch

Some programs do not generate output files themselves but instead require that empty files have already been generated. When the program is run, it searches for an existing file to populate with its output. The touch command allows us to efficiently generate a blank text file to be used by such programs.

touch my_first_touch_file.txt