Basic file and directory-based commands

Let's discuss various shell commands that can be used to work with files and directories. In a nutshell, what we're interested in are these commands:

• ls – for listing folder contents
• touch – for creating an empty text file
• cd – for changing directories, both in absolute and relative terms
• pwd – for showing the current directory
• mkdir and rm – for creating and deleting a file or directory
• cp and mv – for copying or moving a file or a directory
• ln – for working with soft and hard links

These commands are some of the most frequently used commands in the everyday life of a system administrator/engineer. Let's see what they are all about.

Getting ready

We need to go through these commands to really understand what happens on the filesystem as we execute them. So, let's make sure that our cli1 machine is running and let's do it!

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