Questions tagged [files]

Manipulating files: copying, renaming, searching, analyzing, archiving, etc. For operating on text in a file, see /text-processing. For questions about the Files file manager (formerly Nautilus), see /nautilus.

A computer file is a logical entity that resides in a filesystem and is either empty or contains data. Depending on the filesystem, files have certain attributes, such as: (full) path, name, permissions, size, etc. Files are typically arranged in a set of folders or directories to separate them by purpose.

For the Gnome file manager Files, formerly known as Nautilus, see nautilus.

We have a canonical question with several good examples that asks:

How can I replace a string in a file(s)?

There are many tags on this site that are related to files; use these either along-side or in place of the files tag:

rename - either generically renaming files or the prename (perl rename) utility
find - a utility to find files
permissions - who can read, write, and execute a file
directory - logical container for a set of files
filesystems - contains files and directories on a storage device
ls - lists files and their attributes
rm - removes a file
mv - renames one or more files
wildcards - special syntax for a shell to specify more than one file, using a pattern
symlink - special link to another file
logs - files that contain messages from one or more programs
filenames - name of a file
file-copy - copying files from one place to another (e.g. cp, rsync, dd)

There are other tags on this site that deal with the processing of the data in files; use them in place of this tag:

text-processing - performing some operation (modifying, adding, deleting) on text in a file
text-formatting - presenting the text in a file in a different way

4934 questions

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How do I loop through only directories in bash?

I have a folder with some directories and some files (some are hidden, beginning with dot). for d in *; do echo $d done will loop through all files and directories, but I want to loop only through directories. How do I do that?

bash files directory

asked Aug 14 '13 at 15:43

rubo77

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13 answers

How can I get the size of a file in a bash script?

How can I get the size of a file in a bash script? How do I assign this to a bash variable so I can use it later?

bash shell files

asked Jul 13 '11 at 16:22

haunted85

4,201
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9 answers

How to get over "device or resource busy"?

I tried to rm -rf a folder, and got "device or resource busy". In Windows, I would have used LockHunter to resolve this. What's the linux equivalent? (Please give as answer a simple "unlock this" method, and not complete articles like this one.…

files lock

asked Apr 13 '11 at 08:51

ripper234

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12 answers

How to list all files ordered by size

I would like to list all files in the order of big to small in size and the files could be present anywhere in a certain folder.

linux files ls

asked Nov 03 '12 at 15:21

Joe

3,813
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7 answers

What's the point in adding a new line to the end of a file?

Some compilers (especially C or C++ ones) give you warnings about: No new line at end of file I thought this would be a C-programmers-only problem, but github displays a message in the commit view: \ No newline at end of file for a PHP file. I…

files newlines

asked Aug 14 '11 at 19:29

Philipp Stephan

3,250
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1 answer

How to change where a symlink points

Can you tell me what this is in the area marked red? If I want to change /media/files/tb-prod/files to some other path, how would I do that?

files symlink

asked Aug 25 '14 at 04:18

Jalil Khan

3,221
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3 answers

Most efficient method to empty the contents of a file

I am aware of three methods to delete all entries from a file. They are >filename touch filename1 filename < /dev/null Of these three I abuse >filename the most as that requires the least number of keystrokes. However, I would like to know which…

shell-script files truncate

asked Aug 30 '13 at 05:13

debal

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24 answers

Efficiently delete large directory containing thousands of files

We have an issue with a folder becoming unwieldy with hundreds of thousands of tiny files. There are so many files that performing rm -rf returns an error and instead what we need to do is something like: find /path/to/folder -name "filenamestart*"…

linux command-line files rm

asked Apr 26 '12 at 07:50

Toby

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9 answers

How can I display the contents of a text file on the command line?

I would like to display the contents of a text file on the command line. The file only contains 5-6 characters. Is there an easy way to do this?

command-line files cat

asked Aug 11 '13 at 03:41

Sam Weinberg

2,913
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268

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3 answers

Get file created/creation time?

Possible Duplicate: How do I do a ls and then sort the results by date created? Is there a command in Linux which displays when the file was created ? I see that ls -l gives the last modified time, but can I get the created time/date?

files timestamps

asked Nov 11 '11 at 21:59

linuxAddict

261

votes

4 answers

How to tell gzip to keep original file?

I would like to compress a text file using gzip command line tool while keeping the original file. By default running the following command gzip file.txt results in modifying this file and renaming it file.txt.gz. instead of this behavior I would…

command-line files gzip

asked Aug 31 '12 at 08:47

Manuel Selva

3,454
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248

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2 answers

Unzipping a .gz file without removing the gzipped file

I have a file file.gz, when I try to unzip this file by using gunzip file.gz, it unzipped the file but only contains extracted and removes the file.gz file. How can I unzip by keeping both unzipped file and zipped file?

command-line files gzip gunzip

asked Sep 18 '14 at 14:47

jack

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14 answers

Find the total size of certain files within a directory branch

Assume there's an image storage directory, say, ./photos/john_doe, within which there are multiple subdirectories, where many certain files reside (say, *.jpg). How can I calculate a summary size of those files below the john_doe branch? I tried du…

files directory directory-structure size

asked Jun 25 '12 at 04:38

mbaitoff

4,911
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244

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11 answers

How can I edit multiple files in Vim?

I know I can open multiple files with vim by doing something like vim 2011-12*.log, but how can I switch between files and close the files one at a time? Also, how can I tell the file name of the current file that I'm editing?

linux command-line vim files

asked Dec 24 '11 at 17:21

cwd

44,479
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237

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7 answers

How to move and overwrite subdirectories (and files) to parent directory?

I have a ton of files and dirs in a subdirectory I want to move to the parent directory. There are already some files and dirs in the target directory which need to be overwritten. Files that are only present in the target should be left untouched.…

shell command-line files

asked Mar 22 '11 at 16:37

EricSchaefer

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