A Quick Introduction to Unix/Creating Directories

Creating Directories mkdir (make directory) You can make a subdirectory of your home directory for your own data files. To make a subdirectory called mytraining in your current working directory type  % mkdir mytraining  To see the directory you have just created, type % ls You can also make a hidden directory if you want to. Use a dot as the first character of the directory name for it to be hidden. Creating down a path Surprisingly often you want to create a directory but not directly at your current position in the directory tree. Suppose I am in my home directory and I want to create directories to hold some files for two courses but in ~/documents/2010/IT/training/Unix/ The first course is an introduction to Linux, second an introduction to Solaris. I can create these directories like this: % mkdir ~/documents/2010/IT/training/Unix/Linux and % mkdir ~/documents/2010/IT/training/Unix/Solaris Naturally, you don't have to specify the complete path from ~, but I have done so here for clarity. Creating a whole path mkdir -p Perhaps less often you want to create not a single directory but rather a directory subtree - that is a directory and directories beneath it. Suppose I am in my home directory and I want to create directories to hold some files for two courses: Redhat for Beginners and Advanced Redhat. We can do this with the -p option on the mkdir command. Here is the command to create the first directory: % mkdir -p ~/documents/2010/IT/training/Unix/Linux/Redhat/beginners This creates the two directories we require in one go. We can then issue the command % mkdir ~/documents/2010/IT/training/Unix/Linux/Redhat/advanced Notice the difference between these two.