Manipulating directories and files — Basics of Bash

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Important note

Wildcards are building blocks for patterns that match files or directories. When you use ls or any other command that works with files and directories, you provide a path (recall relative and absolute paths from the previous lesson). When you refer to a path, you can also use wildcards that will possibly match multiple files or directories at once.

Basic wildcards are:

- - represents zero or more characters
? - represents a single character
[] - represents a range of characters

Example:

ls docs/photos
saturday.jpg    sunday.jpg    dog.jpg    machine.jpg    scan.tiff    scan2.tiff

ls docs/s*
saturday.jpg    sunday.jpg

ls docs/*.jpg
saturday.jpg    sunday.jpg    dog.jpg    machine.jpg

Also, remember the shortcut for "home directory" — it's ~. You can use it in paths. For example, if your home directory is /home/michael, then ~/docs is the same as /home/michael/docs.

Lesson notes

mkdir to create directory
mkdir -p to create multiple levels of directories (e.g. mkdir -p dir1/dir2/dir3)
touch to change the date of a file or create a new file (e.g. touch newfile.txt)
mv to move or rename a file or a directory (e.g. mv old_name new_name)
rm to delete a file (e.g. rm readme.txt)
rm -r to delete a directory and all the directories inside it (e.g. rm -r photos)