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Creating files and folders

Creating a file

So far, we’ve only performed commands that give us information. Let’s use a command that creates something on the computer.

First, make sure you’re in the home directory:

$ pwd
/Users/jojo

Let’s move to the Desktop folder, or “change directory” with cd:

cd Desktop

Once you’ve made sure you’re in the Desktop folder with pwd, let’s try a new command:

touch foo.txt

If the command succeeds, you won’t see any output. Now move the terminal window and look at your “real” desktop, the graphical one. See any differences? If the command was successful and you were in the right place, you should see an empty text file called “foo.txt” on the desktop. Pretty cool, right?

Handy tip: up arrow

Let’s say you liked that “foo.txt” file so much you’d like another! In the terminal window, press the “up arrow” on your keyboard. You’ll notice this populates the line with the command that you just wrote. You can hit “Enter” to create another “foo.txt,” (note - touch command will not overwrite your document nor will it add another document to the same directory, but it will update info about that file.) or you could use your left/right arrows to change the file name to “foot.txt” to create something different.

As we start to write more complicated and longer commands in our terminal, the “up arrow” is a great shortcut so you don’t have to spend lots of time typing.

Creating folders

OK, so we’re going to be doing a lot of work during the Digital Research Institute. Let’s create a project folder in our Desktop so that we can keep all our work in one place.

First, let’s check to make sure we’re still in the Desktop folder with pwd:

$ pwd
/Users/jojo/Desktop

Once you’ve double-checked you’re in Desktop, we’ll use the mkdir or “make directory” command to make a folder called “projects”:

mkdir projects

Now run ls to see if a projects folder has appeared. Once you confirm that the projects folder was created successfully, cd into it.

$ cd projects
$ pwd
/Users/jojo/Desktop/projects

OK, now you’ve got a projects folder that you can use throughout the Institute. It should be visible on your graphical desktop, just like the foo.txt file we created earlier.

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Example