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Unix provides many commands to handle files. I will outline, briefly, the basic ones - ls, cd, cp, mv, and rm.
To use cd (change directory), you must
give it an argument of which directory you wish
to cd to. For example, if you're in your home
directory and issue cd /usr/bin, you will be in
the directory of /usr/bin. If you wish to check
this, issue the command pwd (present working
directory), which would give the output: `/usr/bin'
As an experiment, do a pwd of your home directory. What is this telling you?
The command ls will, among other things, list the contents of the current working directory. An ls of `/usr/man', will usually give the following output:
cat1 cat3 cat5 cat7 man1 man3 man5 man7 manl whatis cat2 cat4 cat6 cat8 man2 man4 man6 man8 mann
ls will probably be your most useful command. ls supports many options (also called switches). A few will be used in the following discussion. The commands cp, mv, and rm directly manipulate your files. cp copies files, mv moves (or renames) them, and rm removes them. If you wish to copy a file foo to a new file boo, enter:
cp foo boo
If you wish to move `boo' to `coo', enter:
mv boo coo
And finally, if you wish to remove `coo', enter:
rm coo
After reading the rest of the chapter on Unix Files, you will discover many different and interesting ways to manipulate files. You may also be wondering how to create files in general. Files are usually created by editors, compilers, or direct unix commands. After a while, files will seem to `pop' up all over!
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