Work

We are quite used to working with files using a graphical user interface (or GUI). In this section, you will learn how to copy, move, create, and delete directories and files.

The cp and mv commands can be used to copy and move (or rename) files and directories respectively. For both commands, you must specify the old and new names. Specifying the path is necessary if you want to move files out of the current working directory.

cp [original-filename] [copy-filename]
mv [original-filename] [new-filename]

cp

Let's make a copy of some raw data before we start modifying it. We will use ls to check our work.

cp book.txt book-copy.txt
ls

mv

The mv command can be used to either move files to a new location or to rename them (which is essentially moving the contents from the old filename to the new file name). Let's use the mv command to rename the copied and compressed file back to the original name.

mv book-copy.txt book-2cities.txt

Warning

Take care when renaming files. It is good practice to keep track of changes in file names and links to the source data.

mkdir

Now you know how to copy and move files, but you may encounter errors if you try to move files to a directory that does not exist. But, have no fear, we can create new directories at the command line with the command mkdir followed by the path to the directories you want to create.

What happens when you run the following commands?

mkdir data results images/
mkdir -p data/results/images

The first line creates two directories, results and images. The second line also create two directories, but they are nested with the parent directory data. The -p argument creates parent directories if they do not already exist.

rmdir

If you created some files or directories that you do not want, you can remove them with the rm and rmdir commands. rmdir will only remove empty directories, but rm -r will remove recursively (deleting the files first and then the directory itself).

rmdir data/results/images
rmdir data/results

rm -r data/results

Key points

Command	Description
cp [old] [new]	copies a file
mv [old] [new]	moves or renames a file or directory
rm [path]	removes (deletes) a file
mkdir [path]	creates a new directory
rmdir [path]	removes an empty directory

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Last update: June 21, 2022