File and Directory Operations Part 2
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Video Transcription
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>> Hey there, Cybrarians,
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and welcome back to the Linux
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Plus course here at Cybrary.
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I'm your instructor, Rob Goelz.
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In today's lesson, we're going to move on with
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our two parter on file and directory operations.
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In today's lesson, we're going to cover
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the importance of text and directory operations;
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moving on to play around with the commands remove,
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remove directory and diff.
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Let's go ahead and get to it with some demo time.
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Here we're back in our CentOS environment,
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and we're where left off right from the previous lesson.
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We're going to move forward,
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and the first command we're going to look
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at is the remove command,
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which is rm; rm is short for remove.
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The basic syntax of rm is rm file,
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or we can also remove a directory
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with this command and we'll see how to do both of those.
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For instance, let's go back to our temp directory.
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Let's cd into temp and do an ls.
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In here we can see our original,
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we can see the other directory, and
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we can see some directory.
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Let's go ahead and remove the original files;
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do an rm on original,
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and that removes the file.
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No muss, no fuss.
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But let's go ahead and try and remove a directory.
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This is where it's going to get a little bit trickier.
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If we do our rm on other dir,
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it's going to say it can't remove that
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because that is a directory;
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it has content, it has other things in it.
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If it's a directory, we have to recursively remove it.
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We can do that by doing rm minus
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r on the directory
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and it will remove all the files in it.
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For our example, let's actually do
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an rs-r some directory.
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Then it'll remove that and all of the stuff in it.
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If you do an ls slash ALL,
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we'll see that our directory
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or subdirectory and our original file are gone.
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Now the only thing that we've
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seen here is the other directory.
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If you're not comfortable removing files this way,
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what you can do is you can specify the I option,
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which is for interactive.
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For instance, let's go ahead and just
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copy back -ar of home,
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rob, somedir,
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we'll copy that back to temp.
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Now lets do an ls, we see somedir again.
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If we want to do this interactively,
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we can do rm minus ir on temp,
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somedir, and this will
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prompt us before it does anything.
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Sorry, that was actually a force command.
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That's a force of habit too.
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Let's not do that. Let's copy this
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back again, and let's do an ls.
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we'll see someder as well,
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We're going do rs minus ir,
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and this will remove the directory
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interactively and prompt us if we want to remove it.
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We say yes and hit "Enter".
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Now we do an ls,
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that's some directories on and all we're left
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with is the other directory.
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Now another and remove command that you should
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know about is the rmdir command.
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rmdir is removed directory and
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it's used to remove an empty directory.
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If we do an ls here,
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we have our other directory,
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and this other directory isn't empty.
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If we try and run rmdir on other directory
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is going to tell us can't remove it, it's not empty.
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Why would we use this when we already have
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our M remove directory is good when you want to
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be very safe and very careful about removing you
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directory and you want to make
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sure that it's an empty directory.
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I generally will run rmdir
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first on it just to make sure that I'm
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removing empty directory and it doesn't have any content
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in it that I accidentally might remove.
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What we could do here, for example,
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is we can descend into this other directory.
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You just see the other directory,
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then this inside of here we see dir 1,
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and we can recursively remove dir 1
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by doing rm minus r under one.
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If we're really gun shy about it,
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we can do rm minus ir dir 1,
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and it'll say descent into directory,
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yes; descending directory dir 2,
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yes; descended directory dir 3, yes. Remove this.
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Remove this, yes. There we are.
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We're back, now we have nothing and other directory.
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Then from there we can see the cd up,
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which is cd dot dot slash,
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that just takes you up one directory being doing an ls,
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and we see other directory.
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Now we know that this is directory is empty so we can go
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rm other directory and
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removes the directory and we're good to go.
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The last thing we're going to look at today is
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something called the diff command.
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Diff is short for difference;
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it just shows you the difference between two files.
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Let's go ahead and go back to
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my home directory and do an ls,
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and we're going to diff file 4 and file 4.
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So the diff on file 3 and file 4.
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Diff just takes in the names of
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the two files that you want to get a difference between.
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It shows you, on the left-hand side,
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the difference between the first file that you give it,
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and on the right-hand side,
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the difference between the second file that you give it.
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The arrows that point left show you
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that these are the differences in the first file,
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file 3, the arrow
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is pointing right to show you that these
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are the differences that came from the
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second file, file 4.
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You can also use the _y option to compare
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these files line by line and
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display the difference between the files in columns.
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We can see that line 1,
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of file 3 is different from line 1 and file 4.
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The only difference is just
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the numbers file 3 versus file 4.
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This is line 2 in file 3,
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and this is line 2 in file 4.
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With that, we've reached the end of this section.
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In this section, we covered performing operations
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on files and directories using ls make dir,
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move, copy,
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and in this lesson we covered remove,
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remove directory and diff.
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Thanks so much for being here and I look
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forward to seeing you in the next lesson.
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