Summary

You are now empowered

With just a handful of commands, you are now all ready to manage files and navigate your way around the command line! Once you get the hang of it, you will find the command line very efficient and often preferable to using Finder (for Mac users).

Command line cheat sheet

As a useful reference, here are all the commands we covered in this recitation, where the text in brackets represents the file or directory you are interested in manipulating:

Command	Description
pwd	print working directory
ls	list contents of the current directory
cd	navigate to your home directory
cd [dir]	navigate to the specified directory
cd ../	navigate “up” one directory, to the parent directory
mkdir [dir]	make a new directory
rmdir [dir]	remove an empty directory
cp [file] [dir]	copy a file to a directory
cp [dir1] [dir2]	copy a directory to a another directory
mv [file] [dir]	move a file to a directory
mv [filename1] [filename2]	rename a file
mv [dir1] [dir2]	move a directory to another directory
rm [file]	remove a file
rm -r [dir]	remove a directory and all contents (use with caution!)
cat [file]	display file to screen (best for small files)
head -n [file]	display first \(n\) lines of a file
tail -n [file]	display last \(n\) lines of a file

Copyright note: In addition to the copyright shown below, this recitation was developed based on materials from Axel Müller.