A Quick Introduction to Unix/Creating Directories

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Creating Directories

mkdir (make directory)

You can make a subdirectory of your home directory for your own data files. To make a subdirectory called mytraining in your current working directory type

 
% mkdir mytraining 

To see the directory you have just created, type

% ls

You can also make a hidden directory if you want to. Use a dot as the first character of the directory name for it to be hidden.

Creating down a path

Surprisingly often you want to create a directory but not directly at your current position in the directory tree. Suppose I am in my home directory and I want to create directories to hold some files for two courses but in

~/documents/2010/IT/training/Unix/

The first course is an introduction to Linux, second an introduction to Solaris. I can create these directories like this:

% mkdir ~/documents/2010/IT/training/Unix/Linux

and

% mkdir ~/documents/2010/IT/training/Unix/Solaris

Naturally, you don't have to specify the complete path from ~, but I have done so here for clarity.

Creating a whole path

mkdir -p

Perhaps less often you want to create not a single directory but rather a directory subtree - that is a directory and directories beneath it. Suppose I am in my home directory and I want to create directories to hold some files for two courses: Redhat for Beginners and Advanced Redhat. We can do this with the -p option on the mkdir command.

Here is the command to create the first directory:

% mkdir -p ~/documents/2010/IT/training/Unix/Linux/Redhat/beginners

This creates the two directories we require in one go. We can then issue the command

% mkdir ~/documents/2010/IT/training/Unix/Linux/Redhat/advanced

Notice the difference between these two.

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