Moving, renaming and removing files and directories

Move (rename) files and directories mv

To move a file from one place to another or to rename it, we can use the mv command. The syntax for the mv command is: mv file1 file2 - this will move or rename file1 to file2.

Now, let's go to our home directory cd ~ and rename my_first_touch_file.txt with a more compact name mftf.txt:

mv my_first_touch_file.txt mftf.txt

Now, let's move mftf.txt to my_first_dir directory:

mv mftf.txt my_first_dir

Remove file or directories rm

To delete (remove) a file or directory we can use the rm command. Let's delete mftf.txt file which we moved to my_first_dir but all that while being in our home directory.

cd ~
rm my_first_dir/mftf.txt

By default rm only works on files. rm can remove a directory and all its contents if we use the recursive option -r.

Now let's delete my_first_dir.

rm -r my_first_dir