FAQ: Navigation - Generalizations

Frequently Asked Questions Command Line FAQ
1

Community%20FAQs%20on%20Codecademy%20Exercises

This community-built FAQ covers the “Generalizations” exercise from the lesson “Navigation”.

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This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

Web Development
Computer Science

Learn the Command Line

FAQs on the exercise Generalizations

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2

I’m having trouble writing the command that will allow me to navigate through directories to 2014/dec/ in the second section first lesson titled “Navigation” I’ve tried cd 2014/dec/ and cd … 2014/dec/. What would the correct command be to navigate to the directory? Thank you for the help.

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3

At the command prompt, type,

pwd

The path should include,

/home/ccuser/workspace/blog

If we list the contents of the blog directory,

ls

2014 2015 hardware.txt

Two of those entries are directories, 2014 and 2015. Which one are you inside of?

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4

What is the difference between a “file” and a “directory.”

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5

A file is a singular object, usually text, but it could also be media or data. A directory is a branch on a tree containing multiple files and/or other directories.

6

This happened to me yesterday as well, I found that I was in 2015 directory and was trying to use

cd 2014/dec

The problem with that is that 2014 directory isn’t a child directory of 2015, which means we need to go one level up using:

cd ..

Always use ‘pwd’ to know where you are. And take a look at the file tree structure to see where you are and where you need to go:

7

What is the difference of the mkdir command and the touch command

8

mkdir creates a new directory folder.

touch creates a new empty file.

Quite a lot of difference when we think about it.

9

What is the command to delete a directory folder if I accidentally created the wrong one?

10

Assuming the directory is still emty, rmdir will work.

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11

Thanks, @mtf !

What if the directory is not empty? Should we delete the files first? How to do that in CLI?

12

To remove files use rm.

$ rm filename

If there are multiple files, then separate the filenames with a space.

$ rm file1 file2 file3

If files have the same extension you can use a wildcard.

$ rm *.txt
3 Likes
13

Thank you, @mtf! I’ll try these commands.

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