Gaurav at 09:38, 28 May 2015

2015-05-28T09:38:49Z

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Pratik kamble at 12:20, 7 May 2015

2015-05-07T12:20:43Z

Sandhya.np14 at 05:35, 9 March 2015

2015-03-09T05:35:19Z

Sandhya.np14 at 05:30, 9 March 2015

2015-03-09T05:30:52Z

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Pratik kamble at 11:26, 9 July 2014

2014-07-09T11:26:54Z

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Vasudeva ahitanal at 08:00, 9 May 2014

2014-05-09T08:00:13Z

Minal: Created page with '{| border=1 !Visual Cue !Narration |- | 0:00 |Welcome to this spoken tutorial on working with regular files in Linux. |- | 0:07 |Files and directories together form the Linux F…'

2012-12-28T09:33:25Z

Created page with '{| border=1 !Visual Cue !Narration |- | 0:00 |Welcome to this spoken tutorial on working with regular files in Linux. |- | 0:07 |Files and directories together form the Linux F…'

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{| border=1
!Visual Cue
!Narration
|-
| 0:00
|Welcome to this spoken tutorial on working with regular files in Linux.

|-
| 0:07
|Files and directories together form the Linux File System.

|-
| 0:13
|In a previous tutorial we have already seen how to work with directories. You can find the tutorial at this website.

|-
| 0:25
|In this tutorial we will see how to handle regular files.

|-
| 0:31
|We have already seen in another tutorial how we can create a file using the cat command. For details please visit this website.

|-
| 0:46
|Let us see how to copy a file from one place to another. For this we have the cp command.

|-
| 0:55
|Let us see how the command is used.

|-
| 1:00
|To copy a single sign we type
cp space one or more of the [OPTION]... space the name of the SOURCE file space the name of the destination file DEST.

|-
| 1:15
|To copy multiple files at the same time.
We write cp space one or more of the [OPTION]...the name of the SOURCE... files that we want to copy and the name of the destination DIRECTORY in which these files would be copied.

|-
| 1:34
|Let us now see an Eg.First we open a terminal.

|-
| 1:42
|We already have a file named test1 in /home/anirban/arc/

|-
| 1:49
|To see what is in test1.We type
$ cat test1 and press enter.

|-
| 2:00
|As we can see the content of test1 is shown, now if we want to copy it into another file called test2 we would write.

$ cp test1 test2 and press enter.

|-
| 2:22
|Now the file has been copied.

|-
| 2:25
|If test2 doesn't exist it would be first created and then the content of test1 will be copied to it.

|-
| 2:35
|If it already existed then it would be silently overwritten.To see the copied file type

$ cat test2 and press enter.

|-
| 2:52
|You can also copy files from and to different directories.For example.

type

$ cp /home/anirban/arc/demo1 /home/anirban/demo2 and press enter.

|-
| 3:31
|What this will do is that it will copy the file demo1 from source diretory /home/anirban/arc/ to the destination directory /home/anirban it will copy to a file name demo2.

|-
| 3:51
|To see that the demo2 is there type
ls space /home/anirban and press enter.

|-
| 4:13
|We scroll up as you can see here is demo2.

|-
| 4:19
|Before moving a head let us clear the screen.

|-
| 4:25
|If you want the file to have the same name in the destination directory, you may not even mention the file name.For example

|-
| 4:35
|Type $ cp /home/anirban/arc/demo1 /home/anirban/ and press enter.

|-
| 5:03
|This will again copy the file demo1 presenting the /home/anirban/arc/ directory to /home/anirban directory to a file whose name will be demo1 as well.

|-
| 5:20
|As before to see the demo1 type
ls/home/anirban and press enter.

|-
| 5:33
|Here again we would scroll up and as you can see the demo1 file is there.

|-
| 5:40
|Again before moving a head let us clear the screen.

|-
| 5:48
|Another instance when we do not need to give the destination file name is when we want to copy multiple files.

|-
| 5:56
|We assume that we have three files named test1 test2 test3 in our home directory.

|-
| 6:04
|Now we type $ cp test1 test2 test3 /home/anirban/testdir and press enter.

|-
| 6:27
|This will copy all the three files test1,test2 and test3 to the directory /home/anirban/testdir without changing their names.

|-
| 6:41
|You see that this files have actually been copied.We will type ls /home/anirban/testdir and press enter.

|-
| 7:03
|As you can see test1,test2 and test3 are present in this directory.

|-
| 7:10
|There are many options that go with cp. Here we will see only the most important of them.

|-
| 7:18
|Let us first will go back to the slides.

|-
| 7:23
|Among the options -R is an important one. It causes recursive copying of an entire directory structure.

|-
| 7:33
|Let us see an example.

|-
| 7:38
|Let us try to copy all the contents of the testdir directory to a directory called test.

|-
| 7:48
|For that we would type cp testdir/ test and press enter.

|-
| 8:02
|As you can see from the output message.

|-
| 8:06
|Normally we cannot copy a directory having a some content directly with cp command.

|-
| 8:14
|But using the -R option we can do this.

|-
| 8:19
|Now we type cp -R testdir/ test and press enter.

|-
| 8:36
|The files have now been copied to see that the best directory actually exist type ls and press enter.

|-
| 8:47
|As you can see the test directory exists. Let us clear the screen.

|-
| 8:57
|To see the contents inside test type ls test and press enter.

|-
| 9:08
|You can see the contents of the test directory.

|-
| 9:13
|Now we go back to the slides.

|-
| 9:16
|We have seen if a file is copied to another file that already exists the existing file is overwritten.

|-
| 9:25
|Now what if we inadvertently overwrite an important file?

|-
| 9:30
|To prevent anything like this to occur, we have the -b option.

|-
| 9:36
|This makes a backup of each exiting destination file.

|-
| 9:41
|We can also use the -i(interactive)option, this always warns us before overwriting any destination file.

|-
| 9:54
|Now let us see how the mv command works.

|-
| 9:59
|This is used for moving files. Now how is that useful?

|-
| 10:04
|It has two major uses.

|-
| 10:07
|It is used for rename a file or directory.

|-
| 10:11
|It also moves a group of files to a different directory.

|-
| 10:17
|mv is very similar to cp which we have already seen. So let us quickly see how mv can be used.

|-
| 10:29
|We open the terminal and type $ mv test1 test2 and press enter.

|-
| 10:43
|This will rename the file named test1 which was already present in the home directory to a file named test2.

|-
| 10:52
|If test2 already existed then it would be overwritten silently.

|-
| 11:00
|If we want our warning before the file is overwritten.

|-
| 11:05
|We can use the -i option with the mv command.

|-
| 11:10
|Say we have another file named anirban.This file we also want to renew as test2

|-
| 11:20
|We will type mv -i anirban test2 and press enter.

|-
| 11:32
|As you can see a warning is provided asking whether test2 should be overwritten or not.

|-
| 11:41
|If we press y and then press enter, the file would be actually overwritten.

|-
| 11:49
|Like cp we can use mv with multiple files but in that case the destination should be a directory.

|-
| 11:58
|Before moving ahead let us clear the screen.

|-
| 12:03
|Suppose we have 3 files named abc.txt, pop.txt and push.txt in our home directory.

|-
| 12:14
|To see there presence type ls and press enter.

|-
| 12:21
|Here are the files pop.txt,push.txt and abc.txt Let us clear the screen.

|-
| 12:36
|Now we want to move this three files to a directory called testdir.

|-
| 12:46
|What we need to do is type mv abc.txt pop.txt push.txt and then the name of the destination folder which is testdir and press enter.

|-
| 13:14
|To see them type ls testdir and press enter.

|-
| 13:20
|You can see the files abc, pop and push.txt.

|-
| 13:27
|Now let us see some options that go with mv. Let us first go back to the slides.

|-
| 13:37
|Then -b or –backup option is present with the mv command.It will backup every file in the destination before it is overwritten.

|-
| 13:48
|The -i option that we have already seen warns us before overwriting any destination file.

|-
| 13:58
|The next command we will see is the rm command. This command is used for deleting files.

|-
| 14:06
|Go back to the terminal and type ls testdir.

|-
| 14:15
|We can see a file name faq.txt present.Say we want to delete it.

|-
| 14:23
|For this we type
$ rm testdir/faq.txt and press enter.

|-
| 14:37
|This command will remove the file faq.txt from the /testdir directory.

|-
| 14:46
|To see that the file has been actually removed or not.Let us again press ls testdir and press enter.

|-
| 15:00
|We can no longer see the file faq.txt.

|-
| 15:05
|We can use the rm command with multiple files as well.

|-
| 15:10
|The testdir directory contains two files abc2 and abc1.

|-
| 15:17
|Suppose we want to remove this files abc1 and abc2.

|-
| 15:23
|For this we would type rm testdir/abc1 testdir/abc2 and press enter.

|-
| 15:45
|This remove the files abc1 and abc2 from testdir directory.

|-
| 15:53
|To see that they have been removed type ls testdir again.You can no longer see abc1 and abc2.

|-
| 16:07
|Let us clear the screen before moving ahead.

|-
| 16:14
|Now let us go back to the slides.

|-
| 16:18
|Let us summarize what we just said?

|-
| 16:20
|That is do delete a single file we write rm and than the name of the file.

|-
| 16:27
|To delete multiple files we write rm and the name of the multiple files that we want to delete.

|-
| 16:34
|Now let us look into some of the options of the rm command.

|-
| 16:40
|Sometimes a file is write protected,using rm will not delete the file then. In this case we have the -f option which can be used to force delete a file.

|-
| 16:57
|The other common option is the -r option. Let us see where this options are useful?

|-
| 17:07
|Let us switch back to the terminal.

|-
| 17:12
|rm command is not normally used for deleting directories, for that we have the rmdir command.

|-
| 17:21
|But rmdir command normally deletes a directory only den it is empty.

|-
| 17:27
|What if we want to delete a directory that has a number of files and subdirectories inside.

|-
| 17:35
|Let us try the rm command to do this.

|-
| 17:38
|Let us type rm and the directory that we want to delete which is testdir and press enter.

|-
| 17:47
|From the output message we can see that we can not use the rm directory to delete testdir.

|-
| 17:55
|But if we combine the -r and -f option then we can do this.

|-
| 18:03
|Press rm -rf testdir and then press enter.

|-
| 18:16
|Now the testdir directory has been successfully deleted.

|-
| 18:22
|Let us now go back to the slides to study the next command.

|-
| 18:27
|The cmp command.

|-
| 18:29
|Sometimes we need to check whether two files are same. If they are same then we may delete one of them.

|-
| 18:37
|Also we may want to see whether a file has changed since the last version.

|-
| 18:44
|For these and many other purposes we can use the cmp command.

|-
| 18:49
|It compares two files byte by byte.

|-
| 18:54
|To compare file1 and file2 we would write cmp file1 file2.

|-
| 19:03
|If the two files have exactly same content then no message would be shown.

|-
| 19:11
|Only the prompt will be printed.

|-
| 19:14
|If there are differences in their contents then the location of the first mismatch will be printed on the terminal.

|-
| 19:25
|Let us see how cmp works.We have two files named sample1 and sample2 in our home directory.

|-
| 19:35
|Let us see what they contain?

|-
| 19:38
|Type cat sampe1 and press enter.It contains
the text “This is a Linux file to test the cmp command”

|-
| 19:50
|The other file sample2 will contain the text and to see that we will type cat sample2 and press enter.

|-
| 20:00
|It will contain the text “This is a Unix file to test the cmp command.”

|-
| 20:06
|Now we would apply the cmp command on this two files.

|-
| 20:11
|We will write cmp sample1 sample2 and press enter.

|-
| 20:23
|As we can see the first difference between the two files sample1 and sample2 is pointed out.

|-
| 20:32
|Let us clear the screen before moving ahead to the next command.

|-
| 20:38
|The next command we will see is the wc command.

|-
| 20:43
|This command is used to count the number of characters, words and lines in a file.

|-
| 20:50
|We have a file named sample3 in our home directory.

|-
| 20:56
|Let us see its content, for that we will type cat sample3 and press enter.

|-
| 21:05
|This is the content of sample3.

|-
| 21:10
|Now let us use the wc command on this file.

|-
| 21:14
|For that we would write wc sample3 and press enter.

|-
| 21:25
|The command points out that the file has 6 lines, 67 words and 385 characters.

|-
| 21:38
|These were some of the commands that help us to work with files.

|-
| 21:43
|There are many more commands. Moreover each of the command that we saw has many other options.

|-
| 21:51
|I encourage you to see more about them using the man command.

|-
| 22:00
|This brings me to the end of this tutorial at last.

|-
| 22:04
| Spoken Tutorial Project is a part of the Talk to a Teacher project, supported by the National Mission on Education through ICT, MHRD, Government of India.

|-
| 22:17
|More information on the same is available at the following link http://spoken-tutorial.org/NMEICT-Intro.

|-
| 22:34
|This is Anirban signing off . Thanks for joining.

@@ Line 32: / Line 32: @@
 |-
 | 01:00
-|To copy a single file, we type:
+|To copy a single file, we type: cp space one or more of the [OPTIONS]... space the name of the SOURCE file space the name of the destination file (DEST).
- cp space one or more of the [OPTIONS]... space the name of the SOURCE file space the name of the destination file (DEST).
 |-
 | 01:15
 |To copy multiple files at the same time,
- We write cp space one or more of the [OPTIONS]...the name of the SOURCE files that we want to copy and the name of the destination DIRECTORY in which these files would be copied.
+We write cp space one or more of the [OPTIONS]...the name of the SOURCE files that we want to copy and the name of the destination DIRECTORY in which these files would be copied.
 |-
@@ Line 50: / Line 49: @@
 |-
 | 01:49
-|To see what is in test1, we type:
+|To see what is in test1, we type:$ cat test1 and press Enter.
- $ cat test1 and press Enter.
 |-

@@ Line 73: / Line 73: @@
 |-
 | 02:52
-|You can also copy files from and to different directories. For example.
+|You can also copy files from and to different directories. For example,
 type: $ cp /home/anirban/arc/demo1 /home/anirban/demo2 and press Enter.
@@ Line 554: / Line 554: @@
 | 21:10
 |Now let us use the '''wc''' command on this file.
 |-

@@ Line 32: / Line 32: @@
 |-
 | 1:00
-|To copy a single sign we type
+|To copy a single file we type
   cp space one or more of the [OPTION]... space the name of the SOURCE file space the name of the destination file DEST.
@@ Line 191: / Line 191: @@
 |-
 | 8:36
-|The files have now been copied to see that the best directory actually exist type ls and press enter.
+|The files have now been copied, to see that the test directory actually exist type ls and press enter.
 |-
@@ Line 275: / Line 275: @@
 |-
 | 11:10
-|Say we have another file named anirban.This file we also want to renew as test2
+|Say we have another file named anirban. This file we also want to renew as test2
 |-
@@ Line 432: / Line 432: @@
 |-
 | 17:21
-|But rmdir command normally deletes a directory only den it is empty.
+|But rmdir command normally deletes a directory only then it is empty.
 |-
@@ Line 512: / Line 512: @@
 |-
 | 19:38
-|Type cat sampe1 and press enter.It contains
+|Type cat sample1 and press enter.It contains
 the text “This is a Linux file to test the cmp command”

Linux/C2/Working-with-Regular-Files/English-timed - Revision history

Gaurav at 09:38, 28 May 2015

Pratik kamble at 12:20, 7 May 2015

Sandhya.np14 at 05:35, 9 March 2015

Sandhya.np14 at 05:30, 9 March 2015

Pratik kamble at 11:26, 9 July 2014

Vasudeva ahitanal at 08:00, 9 May 2014

Minal: Created page with '{| border=1 !Visual Cue !Narration |- | 0:00 |Welcome to this spoken tutorial on working with regular files in Linux. |- | 0:07 |Files and directories together form the Linux F…'