'File under 'Wheat'.'
- Comment printed on REM's Green album

This series is designed to help you learn more about the Mac OS X command line. If you have any questions about what you read here, check out the earlier columns, write back in the comments below, or join us in the Hardcore X! forum.

Now that we have seen how to use commands with arguments and wildcards, let's see how we can use them to do some useful things. When you are on the command line, eventually you will have to know how to manipulate files and directories: how to move files, delete them, copy them, get information on them, etc.

Before we start, let's review the shell's approach to files and directories. When Terminal.app fires up a new shell, we can see where we are by pwd:

'/Users/dr_unix' is the full pathname of our current working directory. '/Users' is the parent directory of 'dr_unix'. A '/' seperates directories and files in pathnames. Also, recall that a lone '.', in the context of a file or directory name, is a shortcut for 'my current directory'.

Also, recall that '..' is a shortcut for 'my parent directory'.

We've already seen and used three common commands for manipulating files and directories: cd for moving through the directory structure, pwd for finding out where we are, and ls for listing files in a directory and information on them.

Let's continue with the simplest command, cp. (Mnemonic: short for 'copy'.) cp will copy a file or directory from one place to another. It simply takes the form cp sourcefile destinationfile:

We can see that the file was created at the proper time and has the same size. cp has some useful options, so check the man page (man cp) if your need is not quite what you had in mind--

Oh, you didn't want to copy that file? No problem. To get rid of a file, simply use the rm command. (Mnemonic: short for 'remove') Like most Unix shell commands, it is straightforward: rm file1 file2 file3 ...

If you want to delete a directory and all its contents, you can use the '-r' option. This is not recommended; you can do yourself a mischief, as you can well imagine. If you do want to remove an empty directory, but don't want to accidentally remove any files that may be there but forgotten, use the rmdir command instead. (Mnemonic: short for 'remove directory'.)

And if you want to make a directory, there is, of course, a command for this, mkdir. (Mnemonic: short for, you guessed it, 'make directory'.)

If you want to rename a file, you could, I suppose, do a cp to the new name and then rm the original file. However, that would be silly, wasteful, and Not The Unix Way. (That is, you shouldn't have to type two commands when you can make do with one.) mv is the command for renaming/moving a file. (Mnemonic: short for 'mv'. See a pattern forming?)

You can type man more to see all the intricacies, but you can go a long way with 'q' to quit, 'b' to move back a screen, and ' ' to advance one screen's worth.

less is similar to more. (All 'less is more' jokes may be sent elsewhere. I've heard them before.) less allows backward movement in the file in addition to forward movement. Also, less does not have to read the entire file before it starts its output, so on really large files, you don't have to wait as long. less' options are slightly different from more's, so consult your local man page for more information.

If you are interested in only seeing the start or end of a file, head and tail will do the trick. The commands are in the form:

where 'n' is the number of lines at the top/bottom that you wish to see. (If no number is given, both default to ten lines.)

In this example, head and tail were not too useful. After all, the file was only five lines long. If you want to know this beforehand, wc (word count) does this. wc requires one of three flags. wc -l counts the number of lines in a file, wc -w the number of words, and wc -c the number of characters. If the command is given a list of files, it tells the size for each file and gives a grand total.

Now that we've seen how to manipulate files, we are nearly ready for some heavy-duty Unix wizardry. First, we must look at the shell's different forms of quotes, which will be the next column.

You are encouraged to send Richard your comments, or to post them below.

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Richard Burton is a longtime Unix programmer and a handsome brute. He spends his spare time yelling at the television during Colts and Pacers games, writing politically incorrect short stories, and trying to shoot the neighbor's cat (not really) nesting in his garage. He can be seen running roughshod over the TMO forums under the alias tbone1.