Copying, Moving, and Deleting

Copying files

Let’s say we want to make a copy (backup) of our thesis. We use the cp command for this. This has the syntax cp origin destination.

Let’s start by just making a copy in our own directory. We can do this as:

cp thesis.txt thesis-backup.txt

If we do ls -l we should see both the original and copy present.

We could put the copy in a different location, like our home directory, by including the path in the destination, like:

cp thesis.txt ~/thesis-backup.txt

Tip

The source can be anywhere on the filesystem and the destination can be the directory you are in by using . as the destination. E.g., to copy your ~/.bashrc file into your current directory, you can do:

cp ~/.bashrc .

Moving files

Maybe we want to put the backup in a separate directory.

We could copy it there, but we already made a copy. Instead let’s move our copy to a new directory called backup/ under our thesis/ directory.

Starting in ~/shell-lesson-data/exercise-data/writing/thesis/, we can do:

mkdir backup
mv thesis-backup.txt backup

Here we are using a relative path for the destination.

Note

We didn’t need to specify the filename in the destination part of the mv—in this case, it will keep the filename the same, but just move it into the new directory.

We could equivalently do:

mv thesis-backup.txt backup/thesis-backup.txt

We could also be more explicit and do:

mv thesis-backup.txt ./backup/thesis-backup.txt

Tip

Both cp and mv can copy/move multiple files to a destination in a single command. In this case, the last argument is used as the destination.

So to move both thesis-backup.txt and topics.txt, we could do:

mv thesis-backup.txt topics.txt backup

Deleting files

To delete files, we use the rm command (short for remove).

Let’s remove the empty file topics.txt:

rm topics.txt

Try it…

We also put a copy of thesis-backup.txt in our home directory. Remove that file.

To remove a directory, we need to first remove all the files in the directory, and then we can remove the directory using rmdir. Let’s remove the backup/ directory. First go back to your thesis/ sub-directory. Then:

rm backup/thesis-backup.txt
rmdir backup

Tip

We can do a recursive rm to remove all the contents of a directory and the directory itself, by doing:

rm -r backup

Caution

Linux does not have an “undelete” function. When you remove a file on the command line it is gone for good. Therefore you should always double check the rm command you typed before hitting Enter.

Another good practice is to use rm in interactive mode, where it will prompt you before removing a file (and cp and mv can be used this way too).

To make this the default, add the following lines to your .bashrc:

alias rm='rm -i'
alias cp='cp -i'
alias mv='mv -i'

Summary

We learned the following commands:

• mv : move a file or directory

• cp : copy a file or directory

• rm : remove a file (and/or directory if done recursively)

Exercises