LINUX - CHAPTER 2:

HANDLING FILES AND DIRECTORIES

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Files and Path Names

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Files
Linux file names:

In Linux file names, you are essentially allowed to use almost any
character that your computer can display.

Some exceptions:

- File names may not contain a forward slash ( / )

- Spaces are permitted, although they are best avoided
- Files names may never start with a hyphen ( - )

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Files
!! Linux distinguishes uppercase and lowercase letters in file names.
Unlike Windows, where uppercase and lowercase letters in file
names are displayed but treated the same.

Example:
Linux considers x-files and X-Files as
two different file names.

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Directories
Linux supports the idea of hierarchical “directories” which are used to group
files

File names do not need to be unique within the whole system, but only within
the same directory

The slash (“/”) serves to separate file names from directory names and directory
names from one another

Example:
joe/letter.txt would be the file letter.txt in the directory joe

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Directories
The Linux directory structure has a top level, called the root directory and it is
symbolized by the / character.
A visual representation of a typical Linux directory structure:

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Directories
To view the root filesystem, type ls /

Or ls –l /

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Home Directory
On most Linux distributions there is a directory called home under the root directory: /home
Under this /home directory there will be a directory for each user /home/yourname
Your home directory even has a special symbol that you can use to represent it: ~
Change to the user's home directory:

Your current directory is the directory where you are currently working in -> pwd command

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Absolute and Relative Path names
Absolute path:
→ When you give a pathname that starts from the root directory, it is called
an absolute path.

For example, if you are in your home directory and you want to go to
the /etc/perl/Net directory:

=> A name that starts with the root directory / is called an “absolute path
name”

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Absolute and Relative Path names
Relative path:
Names starting from the current directory.
A relative path provides directions using your current location as a point of
reference

Example: if you are in the /etc/perl/Net directory and then you wanted to go to
the /usr/share/doc directory.
Using an absolute pathname, use cd /usr/share/doc
Using relative pathnames, use cd ../../../usr/share/doc command:

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Absolute and Relative Path names
Summary:
A path name starting with a “/” is absolute; all others are relative

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Absolute and Relative Path names
Two shortcuts in relative path names (and even absolute ones):
- “..” refers to the directory above the directory in question in the directory
tree
- “.” within a directory always stands for the directory itself.

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Absolute and Relative Path names
Example:
• /home/joe
“..” refers to /home
•
• Executing in the current dir (letters):
Current directory
cat ../novels/ivanhoe.txt
→ will show the content of the
textfile ivanhoe.txt

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Absolute and Relative Path names
Example:
• “.” within a directory stands for the directory itself

Why would anyone need a method to refer to a directory when this directory has already have been reached?

The shell searches program files for external commands in the directories listed in the environment variable PATH.
If you, as a software developer, want to invoke a program, for example “prog”, which
(a) resides in a file within the current directory
and
(b) this directory is not listed in PATH (for security reasons)
you can still get the shell to start your file as a program by saying

without having to enter an absolute path name

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DIRECTORY COMMANDS

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The current directory: cd & co
cd command
→ for changing the current directory
→ “Change directory”
→ simply give the desired directory as a parameter:

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The current directory: cd
cd command
→ if you don’t give a parameter, you will end up in your homedirectory:

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The current directory: cd & co
cd command
→ “cd -”: changes to the directory that used to be current before the most
recent cd command
=> to alternate between two directories

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The current directory: cd & co
pwd command
→ gives the absolute path of the current directory
→ “print working directory”

Remark:
The current directory is (possible) also visible in your prompt (depending on your system settings)

Example:~/test$

Where ~/test stands for /home/dverbeek/test

→ the tilde (“~”) stands for the current user’s home directory

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Listing files and directories – ls
ls command
→ to find out which files and directories are located within a directory
→ “list” command

→ Without options: output = a multi-column table sorted by file name

Names of files of different types => in different colours.
Most distributions have agreed the colours to use:

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Listing files and directories – ls
ls command – options:
→ -a (“all”): to display hidden files (whose names begin with a dot)
→ -l (“long”): displays not only the file names, but also some additional
information about each file

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Listing files and directories – ls
ls –l
→ Output:
The first character gives the file type:
- plain files “-”
- executable files “-”
- directories “d”
- links “l”
Next nine characters = access permissions
Number of hard links (see later)
Owner of the file (sysadmin here)
Groupsowner (sysadmin)
Size of the file in bytes
Date and time of the last modification of the file’s content
At the end, the name of the file

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Listing files and directories – ls
Other options of ls:

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Listing files and directories – ls
If you want to see the extra information of a directory (such as /tmp):

→ NOT “ls –l /tmp”: because this will list the data for all the files within /tmp

→ use the -d option to suppress this and obtain the information about/tmp itse lf

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Listing files and directories – ls
Display all of the files in a directory as well as all of the files in all subdirectories under a directory.
This is called a recursive listing.

tmp
errorreport
test
test1
test2

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creating and deleting directories –
mkdir and rmdir
mkdir command: to create new directories
→ “make directory”
You can give one or more directory names as argument

→To create nested directories in a single step

=> option –p
otherwise, the command assumes that all directories in the path name except the
last one already exist

Example:

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creating and deleting directories –
mkdir and rmdir
rmdir command: to remove a directory
→ “remove directory”
→ At least one path name of a directory to be deleted must be given
→ The directories that will be deleted MUST be empty (may not contain entries
for files, subdirectories, etc.)

→ Only the last directory in every name will be removed:

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creating and deleting directories –
mkdir and rmdir
rmdir command:
→ option –p
→ all empty subdirectories mentioned in a name can be removed in one step,
beginning with the one on the very right

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FILE COMMANDS

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CREATING files – NANO or TOUCH
The touch command

Used to create a file without any content

Can be used when the user doesn’t have data to store at the time of file creation

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Reading files - CAT
The cat command
to join several files that are given in the command line
Just a single file name
→ the content of that file will be written to standard output

Options:

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Reading files - CAT
The cat command

Examples:

Files vb and file1 are

joined:

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Reading files - CAT
The cat command

Examples:
option –b:
numbers non-empty lines

option –E:
shows end of line

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Reading files - CAT
The cat command

Examples:
option –b: numbers non
empty lines

option –n: numbers all

lines

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Reading files - CAT
The cat command

Examples:

option –s: suppresses

repeated empty lines

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Reading files - CAT
The cat command

Examples:
option –t: shows tabs

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Reading files – HEAD & TAIL
The head (& tail) command

Gives by default the first ten (last ten) lines of every file passed as an argument

The -n option lets you specify a different number of lines:

Example:
“head -n 20 data.txt” or “head -20 data.txt”
→ returns the first 20 lines of the file data.txt

“tail -n 5 data.txt” or “tail -20 data.txt”

→ returns the last 5 lines of file data.txt

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Reading files – HEAD & TAIL
The head (& tail) command

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Reading files – HEAD & TAIL
The head (& tail) command

Example:

10 lines
default

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Reading files – HEAD & TAIL
The head (& tail) command

Example:

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FILE SEARCH PATTERNS

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The command echo
The “echo” command
→used to display line of text/string that are passed as an argument
→= a built in command that is mostly used in shell scripts and batch files to
output status text to the screen or a file
Syntax:
echo [option] [string]

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The command echo
The “echo” command

→ echo in combination with search patterns (see next slides):

• It will search the current directory for matches with the given search pattern.
These matches will be displayed on the screen.
• When no match is found, it literally prints the search pattern.

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simple search patterns - * ?
If you specify a parameter containing an asterisk, like:

prog1/p*.c

=> the shell replaces this parameter by a sorted list of all file names that “match”
the parameter

“Match” means that in the actual file name there may be an arbitrary-length
sequence of arbitrary characters in place of the asterisk

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simple search patterns - * ?
prog1/p*.c

matches with for example:

The only character the asterisk will not match is the slash.

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 simple search patterns - * ?
Example:

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simple search patterns - * ?
Example:

$ echo test/d*
→ This command will output
the matching file names or directories

The search pattern “*” describes

“all files in the current directory”—excepting
hidden files whose name starts with a dot

Search patterns ignore hidden files unless you explicitly ask for them to be
included, namely “.*”
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simple search patterns - * ?
The search pattern “?” stands for exactly one arbitrary character (again
excluding the slash)

Example:

A pattern like

p?.c

matches the names

(and others)

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Character classes []
prog[123].c

→ the square brackets match those characters that are enumerated within
them (no others)

The pattern in the example matches with:

But not with:

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Character classes []
Example:

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Character classes []
You may specify ranges as in

prog[1-9].c

[A-Z]bracadabra.txt

=> The square brackets in the first line match all digits, the ones in the second all
uppercase letters

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Character classes []
REMARK:
In the character encodings the letters are not contiguous:
A pattern like
prog[A-z].c

not only matches progQ.c and progx.c,

but also prog_.c.
→Check an ASCII table, using “man ascii”
→If you want to match “uppercase and lowercase letters only”, you need to use
prog[A-Za-z].c

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File search patterns – Character classes []
You can specify negated character classes
→ interpreted as “all characters except these”

Something like prog[!A-Za-z].c

→ matches all names where the character between “prog” and “.” is not a letter

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HANDLING FILES
(copying, moving, deleting, ...)

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Handling files – Copying, moving and
deleting
cp command:
You can copy files using the cp (“copy”) command.
Two basic approaches:
• 1 ∶ 1 copy
• list of source files

• 1:1 copy:
cp <source filename> <target file name>

→ 1 ∶ 1 copy of the content of the source file will be placed in the target file
→ Normally cp doesn’t ask if it should overwrite the target file
when it already exists, it just does it. (caution!!)
The option -i ask if existing target file should be overwritten.28/09/2023 55
Handling files – Copying, moving and
deleting
cp command:
• 1:1 copy:
Possible to give a target directory (example .) name instead of a target file name
→ The source file will then be copied to that directory, keeping its old name, with
permissions of the target directory

Example:

We first created an exact copy of file list under the name list2
Then we copied the /etc/passwd file to the current directory (represented by the
dot as a target directory name)
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Handling files – Copying, moving and
deleting
cp command:
• list of source files:

Instead of a single source file

→ longer list of source files (or a wildcard pattern)
→ With this approach, it is not possible to copy a file to a different name, but
only to a different directory.

So the Linux command “cp *.txt *.bak” fails with an error message

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Handling files – Copying, moving and
deleting
cp command:

Options:
o-b (--backup): makes a backup of each existing destination file
o-i (--interactive): prompts before overwriting
o-R (--Recursive): copies directories with their content
o-u (--update): copies only if the source file is newer than the target file
o-v (--verbose): explains what is being done

activity

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Handling files – Copying, moving and
deleting
mv command:
The cp command makes an exact copy of a file.
It physically duplicates the file on the storage medium or creating a new, identical
copy on a different storage medium.
The mv (“move”) command moves a file to a different place or change its
name

Syntax of mv:

mv <one file or more to move> <where? directory name>

mv lets you rename directories as well as files

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Handling files – Copying, moving and
deleting
mv command:
Options of mv:

o-b (--backup): makes a backup of each existing destination file

o -i (--interactive): prompts before overwriting
o-v (--verbose): explains what is being done

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Handling files – Copying, moving and
deleting
mv command:
Example:

The original file passwd is replaced by the renamed file list2

Like cp, mv does not ask for confirmation if the target file name exists, but
overwrites the file

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Handling files – Copying, moving and
deleting
rm command:

To delete a file, you must have write permission in the corresponding directory

For example: You are “lord of the manor” in your own home directory
So you can remove even files that do not properly belong to you

Remark: Write permission on a file is completely irrelevant with deleting a file.

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Handling files – Copying, moving and
deleting
rm command:

Similar to cp or mv:
The files are deleted from the file system without confirmation
You should be especially careful when shell wildcard patterns are used

The “rm *” command deletes all non-hidden files from the current directory

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Handling files – Copying, moving and
deleting
Removing directories and subdirectories
with “rm -r *” subdirectories also removed even with content !

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Handling files – Copying, moving and
deleting
rm command:

“rm -i” is more carefully:

for each file, rm asks whether it should be removed (“y” for “yes”) or not (“n” for
“no”)

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Handling files – Copying, moving and
deleting
rm command:

Other options of rm:

o -v (--verbose): displays all activity on the screen

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