Terminal

In this section we are going to show the basic commands to navigate and manage files with the terminal.

Creating folders and files

Directories (folders)

Command	Description
ls	Show the content of the current directory
cd anotherdir	Change directory to anotherdir
cd ..	Change to previous directory
cd ~	Change to home folder (/home/<user>/)
cd /	Change to root folder (/)
pwd	Show path of current directory
mkdir newdirectory	Create new directory called newdirectory

Files

Command	Description
touch newfile.txt	Create new file called newfile.txt
echo "message"	Print message in the terminal
echo "Hello BBGLab!" > newfile.txt	Save output of echo command into a file called newfile.txt
echo "In the morning" >> file.txt	Append to the end of the file file.txt the line output of echo

Moving and manipulating files

Command	Description
mv file.txt destination	Move file file.txt to directory destination
mv dir1/* destination	Move all contents of dir1 to destination
mv file1.txt file2.txt	Change name of file1.txt to file2.txt
cp file.txt destination	Copy file.txt into directory destination
cp file1.txt file2.txt	Copy file1.txt into file2.txt
rm file.txt	Remove file.txt
rm -rf dir1	Remove directory dir1 and ALL THE FILES INSIDE

Other basic commands

Command	Description
echo "message"	Print message in the terminal
cat file.txt	Show contents of file.txt
grep "sentence" file.txt	Search the word "sentence" in file.txt
find . -name "file.txt"	Find in current directory (.) the file file.txt
man echo	Manual (documentation) of command echo

Reference

• Carlos López-Elorduy
• Federica Brando
• Miguel Grau
• Jordi Deu-Pons