Creation Commands

In your learning journey you have very likely heard the acronym CRUD. Which stands for:

Create
Read
Update
Delete

This is the collection of actions you can perform on any given record, object, or in the case of Linux: files/directories.

In the following sections we will be learning about, and practicing, some commands that can be used to perform CRUD actions on files and directories from our Bash shell.

Create Directory

You can create a new directory with the mkdir command. Let’s use it to create a new directory named temp in our home directory. With your current working directory as your home directory enter:

mkdir temp

When mkdir runs successfully there is no standard output (STDOUT) displayed to the user. To see the new directory you can run the ls command to see the contents that were created in the current working directory.

Note

You can use absolute or relative paths with the mkdir command.

Create File

You can create a new empty file with the touch command. In our home directory let’s create a new file called temp.file.

touch temp.file

Again, a successful touch command will provide no message to standard output (STDOUT). To see the new temp.file you will need to run the ls command as shown in the picture.

Creating Hidden Files/Directories

A hidden file or directory is denoted by the name starting with a period (.). We can create hidden files and directories using the exact command above, but adding the period (.) to the file name.