Essential Commands

Your toolkit

In the last lesson you learned to navigate (pwd, ls, cd). Now you’ll learn to do things — create folders, create files, move them around, and read their contents.

Here are the six commands you need:

Command	What it does	Memory trick
`mkdir`	Create a new folder	Make Directory
`touch`	Create a new empty file	”Touch” a file into existence
`cat`	Display file contents	Concatenate (show)
`cp`	Copy a file or folder	Copy
`mv`	Move or rename a file	Move
`rm`	Delete a file	Remove

Practice each one in the terminal simulator below.

Terminal — Practice Mode

Type a command and press Enter. Try: pwd, ls, cd projects, help

/home/user $

Creating things

`mkdir` — Make a directory (folder)

mkdir my-project

This creates a new folder called my-project in your current directory.

TRY ITCreate a new folder called 'test-folder'

`touch` — Create an empty file

touch notes.txt

This creates an empty file called notes.txt. If the file already exists, it updates its “last modified” timestamp (hence the name “touch”).

TRY ITCreate an empty file called 'hello.txt'

Reading things

`cat` — Show file contents

cat notes.txt

This prints the contents of notes.txt to your screen. It’s how you quickly peek at what’s inside a file.

TRY ITDisplay the contents of 'hello.txt' in the home directory

Moving and copying things

`cp` — Copy a file

cp original.txt backup.txt

This creates a copy of original.txt named backup.txt. The original stays untouched.

cp notes.txt documents/notes.txt

This copies notes.txt into the documents folder.

`mv` — Move (or rename) a file

Move a file to a different location:

mv notes.txt documents/notes.txt

Rename a file (move it to a new name in the same location):

mv old-name.txt new-name.txt

mv is like cut-and-paste, while cp is like copy-and-paste.

TRY ITRename the file 'hello.txt' to 'greeting.txt'

Deleting things

`rm` — Remove a file

rm notes.txt

This permanently deletes notes.txt. There is no trash can. There is no undo.

⚠rm is permanent

Unlike dragging a file to the Trash, rm doesn’t have an undo. The file is gone immediately. Always double-check what you’re deleting. When in doubt, use ls first to make sure you’re deleting the right file.

To delete a folder and everything inside it:

rm -r my-folder

The -r flag means “recursive” — delete the folder and all its contents.

Putting it all together

Here’s a realistic workflow: creating a project folder with some files.

mkdir my-website              # Create project folder
cd my-website                 # Go into it
touch index.html              # Create main HTML file
touch style.css               # Create stylesheet
touch app.js                  # Create JavaScript file
mkdir images                  # Create images subfolder
ls                            # Check what we made
# app.js  images  index.html  style.css

In just six commands, you’ve created a basic project structure. When you use AI CLI tools later, they’ll do this for you automatically — but understanding what they’re doing gives you power and confidence.

Common patterns

Here are patterns you’ll use all the time:

Create a project from scratch:

mkdir project-name && cd project-name

The && means “and then” — create the folder, then move into it.

Check before you delete:

ls my-folder          # See what's inside first
rm -r my-folder       # Then delete if you're sure

Copy a whole folder:

cp -r my-project my-project-backup

The -r (recursive) flag works with cp too — it copies the folder and everything inside.

Quick reference

I want to…	Command
Create a folder	`mkdir folder-name`
Create a file	`touch filename.txt`
Read a file	`cat filename.txt`
Copy a file	`cp source.txt dest.txt`
Move/rename a file	`mv old.txt new.txt`
Delete a file	`rm filename.txt`
Delete a folder	`rm -r folder-name`

You now know the 9 core terminal commands (pwd, ls, cd, mkdir, touch, cat, cp, mv, rm). That’s genuinely enough to use any CLI tool effectively. Everything else is just shortcuts and variations.