Getting Started with the Basics
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 >
mv newfile newfile2
kali >
ls
oldfile newfile2
Now when you list (
ls
) that directory, you see
newfile2 but not
newfile,
because it has been renamed. You can do the same with directories.
