Learn Enough Developer Tools to Be Dangerous: Command Line, Text Editor, and Git Version Control Essentials

Chapter 2

Manipulating Files

Having covered how to run a basic command, we’re now ready to learn how to manipulate files, one of the most important tasks at the command line. Because Part I assumes no technical prerequisites, we’re not going to require any familiarity with programs designed to edit text. (As noted in Chapter 1, such programs, called text editors, are the subject of Part II.) This means that we’ll need to create files by hand at the command line. But this is a feature, not a bug (Box 2.1), because learning to create files at the command line is a valuable skill in itself.

Box 2.1: Learning to Speak “Geek”

One important part of learning software development is becoming familiar with the hacker, nerd, and geek culture from which ...