Managing files
In this article, we will be using commands that directly interact with files such as creating, writing, and appending to a file.
Let's start back in our root directory:
cd
and Navigate to our test folder:
cd Desktop/test
- We're going to create a new file in our Desktop Folder:
touch test-file.txt
the file should be created, let's list the contents of the file to make sure:
ls
>> test-file.txt
- Before we write some text into our file, let's print that text into the terminal:
echo "Hello World"
>> Hello World
- Now in order to write the following text into the file, we will use the
>
prefix:
echo "Hello World" > test-file.txt
- Let's list the contents of the file:
cat test-file.txt
>> Hello World
- Appending text to our file requires the use of
>>
:
echo "How are you?" >> test-file.txt
>> Hello World
How are you
using the single >
will overwrite all the content of the file.
- There are also ways to directly interact with file content using the
nano
command:
nano test-file.txt
This should open an editor where you can directly modify the contents of the file.
Add the following line below: "I'm good, how about you?"
You can modify the contents of the editor and use the commands below to manage your changes. In order to save your content, use the command ctrl+o, and ctrl+x to exit.
Let's verify that our content was modified:
cat test-file.txt
>> Hello World
How are you
I'm good, how about you?
- Now that we're done modifying our file, let's try to get rid of the file since we won't be using it anymore:
rm test-file.txt
Our file is deleted. Now let's go to the parent directory and delete the folder:
cd ..
rm test
we went back to Desktop and deleted our test folder successfully.
Now let's attempt to delete a folder with a file in it, we'll start off by creating the folder and a file inside:
mkdir another-folder
cd another-folder
touch another-file.txt
cd ..
We just created the file another-folder
, navigated inside the folder and created the file another-file.txt
, then navigated back to Desktop, Let's attempt to delete the folder:
rm another-folder
>> rm: another-folder: is a directory
We get the error above, which forbids us from making the deletion. The rm
command only allows us to delete files or empty folders. We can delete non-empty folder by using the -rf
prefix:
rm -rf another-folder
This should delete the folder and all the files within it.
If you have a text editor open, some of them might not update the content automatically. You might have to open and close the editor to observe the changes.