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Practical 10

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Practical 10

Uploaded by

omatalkar16
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Practical 9

List the contents of a directory using basic commands like ‘ls’ and
‘pwd’
In the world of technology, the command line interface remains a powerful and
essential tool for both beginners and experts. Learning the fundamentals of command line
navigation and management is a foundational skill for anyone working in IT, development, or
data science.

ls - Listing Directory Contents: The ls command is used to list the contents of a directory.
Here's a breakdown of its syntax and some common flags:

 ls: Lists files and directories in the current working directory.

 ls [path]: Lists files and directories in the specified path.

 Flags:

-l: Long format listing, showing detailed information like permissions, owner,
group, size, and modification date.

-a: Shows hidden files and directories (those starting with a dot).

-h: Human-readable sizes, useful for understanding file sizes at a glance.

Using ls -l for Detailed Directory Listing:


The ls -l command provides a comprehensive view of directory contents in a table format
with several columns. Let's break down the information displayed for each entry:

 Content Permissions: The permissions column displays a series of characters


representing read (r), write (w), and execute (x) permissions for the owner,
group, and others.

 Owner: The owner column shows the user who owns the content..

 Group Owner: The group column displays the group to which the content
belongs. Group ownership allows collaboration and shared access.
 Size in Bytes: The size column specifies the size of the content in bytes. For
directories, this size reflects the space occupied by metadata, not the sum of
sizes of files within.

 Last Modified Date/Time: This column displays the date and time when the
content was last modified.

 File/Directory Name: The final column provides the name of the file or
directory.

Examples:

Create 5 files called file1, file2, …, file5 in our current directory.

Let’s retry the ls command to see what it will do:

ls

file1 file2 file3 file4 file5

Using ls -l:

ls –l

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 28 19:45 file1


-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 28 19:45 file2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 28 19:45 file3
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 28 19:45 file4
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 28 19:45 file5

To display detailed information, type the following:

ls -l chap1 .profile

This displays a long listing with detailed information about chap1 and .profile.
To list all files in the current directory, type the following:

ls –a

. .aptitude .bashrc file2 file4 .profile .ssh


.. .bash_history file1 file3 file5 .rnd .viminfo

This lists all files, including


o dot (.)
o dot dot (..)
o Other files whose names might or might not begin with a dot (.)

 To display detailed information about a directory, type the following:

ls -d -l . manual manual/chap1

This displays a long listing for the directories . and manual, and for the file manual/chap1.
Without the -d flag, this would list the files in the . and manual directories instead of the
detailed information about the directories themselves.

pwd

Print Working Directory: The pwd command reveals the current working directory, letting
you know where you are within the file system. The command will return an absolute (full)
path, which is basically a path of all the directories that starts with a forward slash (/).

Pwd displays the full path of the current working directory.


Type these characters into your terminal and press ENTER:

Pwd

/root

The /root directory is the home directory of the root (administrative) user. If you are logged
in as another user, you will instead see something like this:

Output
/home/your_username

Another example, to display your current directory, types the following:

pwd

The full path name of your current directory displays similar to the following:

/home/dmk

home is root directory and dmk is current directory.

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