Manipulating files and folders with Terminal

In the last article, I tried to show how one can work with files and folders from the Windows command line. If you are more of a Windows user, please be sure to check that article here.

I am going to continue to explain some basic operations one can perform when working with files and folders on Linux OSes. Let's jump into it together by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T to open our terminal.

While in your terminal, whenever you need to clear your screen, press Ctrl+L.

• To know the path of your working directory(folder), execute, pwd

• To move backwards to the folder that is the host of your working directory execute, cd ..

• Say your working directory is Documents and it has three sub directories and you want to move into one of them say houses, execute, cd houses

• To list all the files and directories(folders) in your working directory execute, ls

  Generally, the syntax for the ls command is: ls [ options ] [ /path/to/file ]

  The options section represents the command line arguments that can be used to manipulate the ouput. Let us see some of those optional arguments.

• ls -m to list directory content seperated by comma(,)

• ls -Q to list directory content enclosed by quotation marks("").

• ls -lh to display file size in human readable format.

• ls -g to omit group ownership column. In a moment you will see what group ownership column is.

• ls -F adds a forward slash(/) to directories.

• ls -i to display inode number of files and folders(directories).

• ls -a to display all files including system hidden files.

• ls *. filters files according to the file extension.

• ls -la to display all files and directories in long-list format.

• ls -R to display files and directories recursively.

• ls -r to sorts files in reverse order.

• ls -X to sort files alphabetically by file extension.

• ls -tl to display files according to file creation date and time.

• ls -n to list UIDs and GIDs.

• ls -t to sort files by modification date.

• ls -s to sort files by file size.

• ls -v natural sort of version numbers.

• ls -l to display files in long-list format.

  So this is basically some of the options we can use wrt the syntax ls [option] [/path/to/file]

  so how does this work? i will execute ls

  

  So I have 9 directories and 2 files in my root(working) directory. So the path of my working directory is, /home/sinke. This means that ls command shows just the list of all the content in your working directory.

  To see more or specific details about the content in your working directory you can use ls command with any of the options listed above. E.g. ls -l

  

  Let us inteprete this from left to right.

  1st Column - File/directory permission.

  2nd Column - Number of links.

  3rd Column - Name of the owner.

  4th Column - Name of the group owner(we mentioned this earlier).

  5th Column - File size in bytes.

  6th - 8th Columns - Last modification date.

  9th Column - File/directory name.

  Let's talk about column one a little. For my Documents directory, my column one is, drwxr-xr-x . These are 10 characters, separate them in groups of two; the first character and the last nine characters.

  • The first character character shows the file type. My first character is d which stands for directory(folder). Values for other file types are:

    - Regular files

    b Block special file

    c Character special file

    d Directory

    l Symbolic link

    n Network file

    p FIFO

    s Socket

  • Next nine characters show the file permission. The first three characters are for file permission for the User. The middle three characters are file permission for the group and the last three are file permission for others.

    So for my Documents directory as seen above, i have my first column to be dwrxr-xr-x, this means my Documents is a directory(d). The user has permission to read, write and execute(rwx) the Documents directory. The group owners have permission just to read and execute(r-x) the Documents directory. And others have permission to also read and execute(r-x) the Documents directory.

  • You can use the chmod command to change file permissions. The permission characters and their meaning can be:

    r - permission to read the file.

    w - permission to write to the file.

    x - permission to execute the file.

    s - setgid bit.

    t - sticky bit.

  • Column 3 indicates that sinke is the owner of all the files and directories.

  • Column 4 indicates that sinke is the group that owns the files and directories.

  • Column 5 indicates the sizes of the files and directories.

  • Columnns 6-8 indicates the last modification dates of the files and directories.

  • And column 9 indicates the name of the file or directory.

• To create a new folder/directory say school, in your working directory execute, mkdir school

  You can also create a new folder say school in your working directory and you let school directory to have a subdirectory say class in it. To do this execute, mkdir school/class

• To rename a directoy say Document to say Docku execute, mv Document Docku

• To move a directory say oven from your working directory to say Desktop, do, mv oven /home/sinke/Desktop . Noticed how i specified the path?

• To copy a directory say school from your working directory to another directory say Desktop execute, cp -r school /home/sinke/Desktop . Noticed how i specified the path?

• To delete a folder/directory say school from your working directory do, rm -r school . Note: -r is used to delete the directory recursively, which means all its content will be deleted as well.

• To create a text(specific extension) file say text in your working directory execute, touch text.txt

• To rename this text file from text.txt to say open.txt execute, mv text.txt open.txt

• To move a file say school.txt from your working directory to say Desktop execute, mv school.txt /home/sinke/Desktop

• To copy a file say school.txt from your working directory to say Desktop execute, cp school.txt /home/sinke/Desktop .

• To delete a file say school.txt from your working directory execute, rm school.txt