Basics of Bash
2026-02-21 02:56 Diff
https://hexlet.io/courses/basics_of_bash/lessons/files/theory_unit

Important note

Wildcards are building blocks for patterns that match files or directories. When you use ls or any other command that works with files and directories, you provide a path (recall relative and absolute paths from the previous lesson). When you refer to a path, you can also use wildcards that will possibly match multiple files or directories at once.

Basic wildcards are:

      • represents zero or more characters
  • ? - represents a single character
  • [] - represents a range of characters

Example:

ls docs/photos saturday.jpg sunday.jpg dog.jpg machine.jpg scan.tiff scan2.tiff ls docs/s* saturday.jpg sunday.jpg ls docs/*.jpg saturday.jpg sunday.jpg dog.jpg machine.jpg

Also, remember the shortcut for "home directory" — it's ~. You can use it in paths. For example, if your home directory is /home/michael, then ~/docs is the same as /home/michael/docs.

Lesson notes

  • mkdir to create directory
  • mkdir -p to create multiple levels of directories (e.g. mkdir -p dir1/dir2/dir3)
  • touch to change the date of a file or create a new file (e.g. touch newfile.txt)
  • mv to move or rename a file or a directory (e.g. mv old_name new_name)
  • rm to delete a file (e.g. rm readme.txt)
  • rm -r to delete a directory and all the directories inside it (e.g. rm -r photos)