Creating Directories and Files

Today we begin learning how to work with the file system. We will cover how to create directories and files.

The command to create directories

NAME
mkdir – make directories

SYNOPSIS
mkdir [OPTION] DIRECTORY…

Lets first change our working directory to the temporary directory /tmp:

$ cd /tmp

Lets now create directory called “level1″:

$ mkdir level1

Lets now check to see if our directory was created:

$ ls
level1

Lets now create a directory “level2″ inside the directory “level1″ but from our current working directory of /tmp by specifying the relative path:

$ mkdir level1/level2
$ ls level1
level2

Lets now create a directory inside the directory “level1″ by specifying an absolute path. If you specify an absolute path it doesn’t matter what your current working directory is:

$ mkdir /tmp/level1/level2_2
$ ls level1
level2  level2_2

Declaring the absolute path is useful when you want to create a directory but do not want to change your current working directory to the directory where you want to create the directory.

If we want to create a directory structure that is a few directories deep and don’t want to create each sub-directory manualy like:

mkdir subdir1
cd subdir1
mkdir subdir2
cd subdir2
mkdir subdir3

We can use the mkdir -p option to accomplish this:

$ mkdir -p subdir1/subdir2/subdir3

If we want to create more then one directory at the same time we execute mkdir and list each directories absolute or relative path seperated by spaces:

$ mkdir directory1 directory2 /tmp/directory3

The first two “directory1″ and “directory2″ are relative paths and the third “/tmp/directory3″ is an absolute path. This demonstrates that you can use either in the same command.

Lets now see the result:

$ ls
directory1  directory2  directory3  level1  subdir1

The command to create files

NAME
touch – change file timestamps

SYNOPSIS
touch [OPTION]… FILE…

To create a file you use the “touch” command followed by the name of the file you want to create. Lets create the file “file1″ :

$ touch file1

Note that unlike windows files do not need to have file extensions like .txt, .jpg, specified. You can create a file without any file extension. This is perfectly normal. Good practice is to place extensions on files making it easier to identify files and also for programs to identify file types automatically.

$ touch file1.txt

In Linux unlike windows you can have multiple “.” in your file names. Because there is no definite file extension defined by the name of the file. This is very useful for when you are changing files and want to specify original or backup versions. You can easily identify these files or search for them. Just like with mkdir command you can create more then one file at the same time by separating them by spaces.

$ touch file1.txt.org file1.txt.bak

$ ls
directory1  directory3  file1.text     file1.txt.org  subdir1
directory2  file1       file1.txt.bak  level1

You may be wondering how to tell the difference between directories and files if you can create a file without a file extension. The answer is that most new Linux terminals display directories and files with different colors.

Now that you know how to create directories and files the next step is to learn how to move, rename, and delete them.