Playground – Manipulating files and Directories in Linux

This is a practice sheet for The following Video from Linux Command Line Journey Youtube Playlist. We would recommend you to watch the full video before doing this exercise.

1. Creating Directories

a. Make a directory called “playground” in your home directory.

cd ~
mkdir playground

b. Go-to the “playground” directory and create two more directories here – “dir1” and “dir2”

cd playground
mkdir dir1
mkdir dir2

c. Can you create the above directories using only 1 command ?

mkdir -p ~/playground/dir1 ~/playground/dir2

2. Copying Files

a. Copy the file /etc/passwd to the current working directory, i.e. ~/playground

cp /etc/passwd .

b. Repeat the above copy command with “-v” option

cp -v /etc/passwd .

c. Repeat the copy command with “-i” option this time. Notice any difference ?

cp -i /etc/passwd .

3. Moving and renaming files

a. Rename the “passwd” file you copied, to “fun”

mv passwd fun

b. Move the file “fun” to dir1

mv fun dir1

c. Move the file “fun” from dir1 to dir2

mv dir1/fun dir2

d. Move the file “fun” from dir2 back to “playground”

mv dir2/fun .

e. Move the file “fun” into dir1 again

mv fun dir1

f. Move dir1 into dir2 and confirm it with “ls” command

mv dir1 dir2
ls -l dir2
ls -l dir2/dir1

g. Put everything back

mv dir2/dir1 .
mv dir1/fun .

4. Creating Hard Links

a. Create 3 hard links of the file “fun”, and call it “fun-hard” and store in 3 places – 1. the same directory, 2. inside dir1 directory, 3. inside dir2 directory

ln fun fun-hard
ln fun dir1/fun-hard
ln fun dir2/fun-hard

5. Creating Symbolic Links

a. Create 3 symbolic links of the file “fun”, and call it “fun-sym” and store in 3 places – 1. the same directory, 2. inside dir1 directory, 3. inside dir2 directory

ln -s fun fun-sym
ln -s ../fun dir1/fun-sym
ln -s ../fun dir2/fun-sym

b. Create symlink of directory “dir1” and call it “dir1-sym”

ln -s dir1 dir1-sym

6. Removing Files and Directories

a. Delete the hard link “fun-hard” inside “playground” directory

rm fun-hard

b. Delete the original file “fun” from “playground” directory. Use the “-i” option while deleting

rm -i fun

c. See what happened to the “fun-sym” symbolic links we created. It is broken now ?

Before:

After:

ls -l

d. Delete the symbolic links we created “fun-sym” from all the 3 places. Try to do it with 1 command.

rm fun-sym ./dir1/fun-sym ./dir2/fun-sym

e. Remove your “playground” directory. Remember, “playground” is a directory. How would you remove it ? Do you get the following error ?

cd
rm -r playground

All Done ! Congratulations.