13.5. Exercises: Terminal

1. If you haven’t done so already, set up your command line environment with instructions from the Setting Up Your Terminal appendix.

2. Using your terminal, navigate to your Home directory using cd ~.

3. Use ls to view the contents of your Home directory.

4. Use cd to move into your Desktop directory. For most, the command to do this is cd Desktop/ since the Desktop is most often a child of the Home directory.

5. In the terminal, use mkdir to create a folder on the Desktop called “my_first_directory”. Look on your Desktop. Do you see it?

6. Use cd my_first_directory/ to move inside that directory.

7. pwd to check your location.

8. There, make a file called “my_first_file.txt” with touch my_first_file.txt.

9. Open the file and write yourself a message!

10. Back in the terminal, list the contents of your current directory from the terminal with ls.

11. Make a copy of your “my_first_file.txt” from its current spot to directly on the Desktop with cp my_first_file.txt ../my_first_copy.txt.

12. Move back out to your Desktop directory from the terminal with cd ...

13. Use ls in the terminal to verify your “my_first_copy.txt” on your Desktop. Open it up. Is it the same as your first file?

14. Move your copied file into your “my_first_directory” with mv my_first_copy.txt my_first_directory/.

15. Use ls to see that the copied file is no longer on your Desktop.

16. Type cd my_first_directory/, followed by ls to confirm that your copy has been moved into “my_first_directory”.

17. cd .. to get back out to your Desktop.

18. Type rm -r my_first_directory/ and do a visual check, as well as ls on your terminal, to verify that the directory has been removed.