In the previous tutorial you learned to move around the filesystem and see what is in it. Now you will change it.

Four commands do almost all of this work:

Two of them behave in ways that catch out nearly every beginner, and this tutorial makes a point of showing you both before they bite you.

A directory has been prepared for you at /home/laborant/inbox:

/home/laborant/inbox
├── report.txt
├── draft.txt
├── notes.txt
└── archive
    ├── old-1.txt
    └── old-2.txt

Part 1: Making directories

mkdir makes one directory

mkdir is short for make directory. Give it a name and it creates it:

$ cd /home/laborant
$ mkdir photos
$ ls
inbox  photos

Like most commands that succeed, it says nothing. The new directory simply appears.

The limit you will hit immediately

Now try to create a directory several levels deep, where the levels in between do not exist yet:

$ mkdir photos/2026/january
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘photos/2026/january’: No such file or directory

That error confuses people, because photos clearly does exist. The problem is 2026, the level in the middle. mkdir creates one directory, and it expects the parent to already be there.

You could fix this by running three separate commands, one level at a time. Nobody does that, because there is an option for it.

The -p option

-p tells mkdir to create any missing parent directories along the way:

$ mkdir -p photos/2026/january
$ ls photos
2026

No error, and the whole chain now exists. -p has a second useful habit: it does not complain if the directory is already there, which matters a lot once you start writing scripts.

Part 2: Making empty files

touch creates a file with nothing in it

You met touch briefly in the last tutorial. It creates an empty file:

$ cd /home/laborant/photos
$ touch caption.txt
$ ls -l
total 4
drwxrwxr-x 3 laborant laborant 4096 Sep 21 16:20 2026
-rw-rw-r-- 1 laborant laborant    0 Sep 21 16:20 caption.txt

Look at the size column. caption.txt is 0 bytes. The file exists, it has a name, and it contains absolutely nothing. That is often exactly what you want, for example when a program expects a file to be present before it will start.

Remember the rule from the last tutorial: a bare filename with no path means the file is created in your current directory. Check with pwd if you are unsure.

Your turn

Create the directory /home/laborant/projects/website, then create an empty file called index.html inside it.

Note that neither projects nor website exists yet, so this is a job for the option you just learned.

mkdir -p /home/laborant/projects/website
cd /home/laborant/projects/website
touch index.html

Part 3: Moving and renaming

mv moves things

mv is short for move. It takes two things: what you want to move, and where you want it to go.

$ cd /home/laborant
$ mv photos/caption.txt inbox/
$ ls inbox
archive  caption.txt  draft.txt  notes.txt  report.txt

caption.txt is now in inbox and no longer in photos. It was moved, not copied.

The surprise: mv also renames

Here is the behaviour that catches people out. If the destination you give is not an existing directory, mv treats it as a new name:

$ cd /home/laborant/inbox
$ ls
archive  caption.txt  draft.txt  notes.txt  report.txt

$ mv caption.txt title.txt

$ ls
archive  draft.txt  notes.txt  report.txt  title.txt

There is no separate rename command in Linux. Renaming is moving, from one name to another inside the same directory. Once that clicks, mv stops feeling strange.

It also means you can move and rename in a single step, by giving a destination path that ends in the new name:

$ mv title.txt /home/laborant/projects/website/heading.txt

That moves the file and renames it at the same time.

Your turn

Move report.txt out of /home/laborant/inbox and into the website directory you made earlier, renaming it to README.txt in the process.

Do it in a single command.

mv /home/laborant/inbox/report.txt /home/laborant/projects/website/README.txt

Now a question to check the idea really landed.

Part 4: Deleting

rm deletes a file

rm is short for remove:

Back in the website directory, you still have the heading.txt file left over from the mv examples earlier. Let us get rid of it:

$ cd /home/laborant/projects/website
$ ls
README.txt  heading.txt  index.html

$ rm heading.txt

$ ls
README.txt  index.html

Gone, with no confirmation prompt and no message.

The surprise: there is no undo

This is the single most important sentence in this tutorial.

rm refuses directories by default

Try removing a directory the same way and it stops you. The photos directory from Part 1 is still lying around, so use that:

$ cd /home/laborant
$ ls photos
2026

$ rm photos
rm: cannot remove 'photos': Is a directory

This is a safety feature. A file is one thing, but a directory might contain hundreds of files you have forgotten about, so rm makes you be explicit.

The -r option means recursive, which tells rm to go into the directory and delete everything inside it as well:

$ rm -r photos
$ ls
inbox  projects

Note what just happened. photos contained 2026, which contained january. One command removed the whole chain without a single question.

Your turn

In /home/laborant/inbox, delete two things:

• the file draft.txt
• the entire archive directory, including the files inside it

Leave notes.txt alone. It should still be there when you are finished.

cd /home/laborant/inbox
ls
rm draft.txt
rm -r archive
ls

What you learned

The two ideas worth carrying forward:

• Renaming is just moving. There is no separate rename command, because moving a file to a new name in the same directory is the same operation.
• Deleting is permanent. Run ls before you run rm, every time, until it is automatic.

Next up: reading and editing the contents of files, with nano and vim.