15 Let’s create newfile with
touch
:
kali >
touch newfile Now when I then use
ls –l
to see the long list of the directory, I see that
a new file has been created named newfile. Note that its size is
0
because there
is no content in newfile.
Creating a Directory The command for creating a directory in Linux is
mkdir
, a contraction of
make directory. To create a directory named newdirectory, enter the following
command:
kali >
mkdir newdirectory To navigate to this newly created directory, simply enter this:
kali >
cd newdirectory Copying a File To copy files, we use the
cp
command. This creates a duplicate of the file in
the new location and leaves the old one in place.
Here, we’ll create the file oldfile in the root directory with
touch
and
copy it to /root/newdirectory, renaming it in the process and leaving the ori-
ginal oldfile in place:
kali >
touch oldfile kali >
cp oldfile /root/newdirectory/newfile Renaming the file is optional and is done simply by adding the name
you want to give it to the end of the directory path. If you don’t rename the
file when you copy it, the file will retain the original name by default.
When we then navigate to newdirectory, we see that there is an exact
copy of oldfile called newfile:
kali >
cd newdirectory kali >
ls newfile oldfile
Renaming a File Unfortunately, Linux doesn’t have a command intended solely for renaming
a file, as Windows and some other operating systems do, but it does have the
mv
(move) command.
16 Chapter 1
The
mv
command can be used to move a file or directory to a new loca-
tion or simply to give an existing file a new name. To rename newfile to
newfile2, you would enter the following:
kali >
