Much of what you’ll need to do on the command line involves working with files in

some way—creating, deleting, copying, renaming, and moving them. This chapter
covers the essentials of interacting with files and directories.
Create a File
I want to begin by mentioning a curious command called touch that serves two
interesting functions:
• When supplied with the name of a nonexistent file as an argu ment, touch creates
an empty file.
• When supplied with the name of an existing file or folder as an argument, touch
updates its modification date to the current date and time, marking it as modified.
Try entering the following command:
touch file1
Now use ls -l to list the contents of your current directory. You’ll see file1 in
the list. This file that you’ve just created is completely empty. It doesn’t have
an extension, or a type, or any contents. It’s just a marker, though you could use
a text editor, for example, to add to it.
Why would you do this? There are occasionally situations in which a program behaves
differently based solely on the existence of a file with a certain name in a
certain place. What’s in the file doesn’t matter— just that it’s there. Using touch
is the quickest way to create such a file.
But for the purposes of this book, the reason to know about touch is so you can
create files for your own experiments. Since you’re creating the
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files, you can rename, move, copy, and delete them without worrying about causing
damage. So try creating a few files right now with touch.
As for the other use of touch—marking a file as modified—you might do this if, for
example, the program that saved it failed to update its modification date for some
reason and you want to make sure your backup software notices the new version. You
use exactly the same syntax, supplying the name of the existing file:
touch file1
When applied to an existing file, touch doesn’t affect its contents at all,
only its modification date.
Create a Directory
To create a directory (which, of course, appears in the Finder as a folder), use
the mkdir (“make directory”) command. To make a directo- ry called apples, you’d
enter the following:
mkdir apples
That’s it! A few other potentially useful things to be aware of:
• You can create a new directory in some other location than your current one (for
example, you could enter mkdir ~/Documents/ap‐ ples).
• If you want to create a hierarchy of directories—for example, you want to create
a directory called oranges inside ~/Documents/fruit/ citrus/ and the fruit and
citrus directories don’t already exist— add the -p flag (for example: mkdir -p
~/Documents/fruit/citrus/ oranges).
Note: Remember, if you want to create a file with a space in the name, put it in
quotation marks (touch "my file") or escape the space character (touch my\ file).
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• Spaces, apostrophes, and quotation marks in directory names must be escaped (see
Spaces in Paths).
Copy a File or Directory
To duplicate a file (in the same location or another location), use the cp (“copy”)
command. It takes two arguments: the first is the file you want to copy, and the
second is the destination for the copy. For example, if you’re in your home
directory (~) and want to make a copy of the file file1 and put it in the Documents
directory, you can do it like this:
cp file1 Documents
The location of the file you’re copying, and the location you’re copying it to, can
be expressed as relative or absolute paths. For instance:
cp file1 /Users/Shared
cp /Users/jk/Documents/file1 /Users/Shared
cp file1 ..
cp ../../file1 /Users/Shared
If you want to duplicate a file and keep the duplicate in the same directory, enter
the name you want the duplicate to have:
cp file1 file2
Likewise, if you want to copy the file to another location and give the copy a new
name, specify the new name in addition to the destination:
cp file1 Documents/file2
Avoid Overwriting Files When Copying
Look back at the first example above:
cp file1 Documents
Anything strike you as suspicious about that? We know there’s a file called file1
and a directory called Documents in the current directory,
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so will this command copy file1 into Documents or make a copy in the current
directory and name the copy Documents (potentially overwriting the existing
directory)? The answer is: cp is smart. The command assumes that if the second
argument is the name of an existing directo- ry, you want to copy the file to that
directory; otherwise, it copies the file in the current directory, giving it the
name of the second argument. It won’t overwrite a directory with a file.
But, in fact, cp is not quite as smart as you might like. Let’s say there’s already
a file in Documents that’s called file1. When you enter cp file1 Documents, the
command happily overwrites the file that’s already in Documents without any
warning! The same goes for duplicating files
in the same directory. If the current directory contains files file1 and file2,
entering cp file1 file2 overwrites the old file2 file with a copy of file1!
Fortunately, you can turn on an optional warning that appears if you’re about to
overwrite an existing file, using the -i (“interactive”) flag. So if you enter cp -
i file1 Documents and there’s already a file1 in Docu‐ ments, you’ll see:
overwrite Documents/file1? (y/n [n])
Then enter y or n to allow or disallow the move. “No” is the default.
Because the -i flag can keep you out of trouble, I suggest you always use it with
the cp command. Or, for an easier approach, set up an alias that does this for you
automatically; see Create Aliases.
Copy Multiple Files
You can copy more than one file at a time, simply by listing all the files you want
to copy, followed by the (single) destination where all the copies will go. For
example, to copy files named file1, file2, and file3 into /Users/Shared, enter
this:
cp file1 file2 file3 /Users/Shared
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Copy a Directory
You can use the cp command to copy a directory, but you must add the -r
(“recursive”) flag. For instance, given a directory named apples, this command
would produce an error message:
cp apples ~/Documents
The correct way to enter the command is as follows: