Question

1. Create the directory tree above in your /home/username folder using at most three (3) mkdir commands

2. Use the ‘cat’ utility to create two text files called “nfile1” & “nfile2” in the “notes” directory. “nfile1” should contain the names of persons (at least 2 persons).

3. Use the vi editor to create a simple text file, then save & quit. Briefly explain the various modes of vi and show how to delete a character, a word and a line

4. Use the ‘tar’ utility to create an archive file of the ‘labs’ directory. Name your archive file labs.tar. Show how you can retrieve the contents from the labs.tar file.

5. Move the file “nfile2” into the “unix” directory.

6. Copy the file “nfile1” into the “java” directory.

7. Show how you would create the files “test1”, “test2”, & “test3” in the “test” directory to ensure that they have the same file creation date/time.

Answer 1

(a). If you want to create a directory, use: mkdir directory_name. To create multiple directories, use braces {}. Ex if you want to create 3 directories named directory1, directory2 and directory3 at the current directory, then write: mkdir {directory1, directory2, directory3}. Also to make directory with a hierarchy, you can use -p. Ex - mkdir -p dir1/dir2/dir3 will make dir1 at current directory, dir2 inside dir 1, and dir3 inside dir2.

(b). cat is a very popular command used to create files, concatinate, display and echo a file. To do the second task of the question, create the "notes" directory using mkdir, or change directory to it using cd command (if notes is already made). Then write:

cat > nfile1

and press enter. Then type two names and press CTRL+D to save file.Do similar for creating the nfile2.

(c). vi editor is one of the most popular text editors for Linux. To create a new text document, just write:

vi filename.txt

and press enter. Then a blank screen is presented. But vi editors has two modes, command and insert. In command mode you can do operations such as save (using w) or close. (using q). To start typing, you need to get into insert mode by pressing i. To delete a character, word and line, you can press x, dw, and dd respectively

(d). To create an archive of whole directory, write: tar -rczf path/where/you/want/to/store/labs.tar labs

To retrieve it, write: tar xf labs.tar