Fedora Linux

Managing Files

A large part of system administration involves dealing with files and directories: creating directories, copying files, moving files and directories around, and deleting them. Fedora provides a powerful set of tools for managing files from the shell prompt as well as graphically.

How Do I Do That?

Linux, like most modern operating systems, uses a tree-like hierarchy to store and organize files. To manage files effectively, extend the hierarchy to organize your data.

Understanding Linux directory names

Fedora’s master directory (or folder, as it would be referred to by other operating systems) is called the root directory; it may contain files and directories. Each of those directories may in turn contain other files and directories.

For each user, one directory is designated as the home directory, and that is where that user stores her personal files. Additionally, each process (a running copy of a program) has a current working directory on the system, which is the directory that it accesses by default unless another directory is explicitly specified.

The root directory is always the same system-wide; the home directory is consistent for a particular user, but varies from user to user; and the current working directory is unique to each process and can be changed anytime.

A pathname specifies how to find a file in the file hierarchy. There are three different pathname schemes that can be used, based on the three different starting points (root, home, and current ...