Linux CLI basic commands

DerekAustin26

I need to make a file called "auto_insurance" as apart of my Linux assignment

i've read about several utilities... who, cal, ls, wc , etc..

which utility do I use to make this particular file?

utility > filename

or do I use another one that I am not aware of?

Met44

What you want contained in the file will determine the manner in which you create it. If you want to store the output of a command in the file, then you would use redirection, like you did here:

utility > filename

Realize that this form of redirection (using a single greater than sign) will overwrite any existing file named "filename". So if you wish to store the output of multiple commands, you will overwrite the file each time, thus only saving the output of the last command you entered -- not what you wanted to do! You instead want to "append" to the end of the file. There is a slight difference in the syntax of "redirecting" versus "redirecting and appending" which should be well-explained in the Linux book for your course under the redirection section.

If you want to create a file to write in it yourself, you will want to use a text editor such as nano, vim, or emacs (or gedit, which is similar to Microsoft's Notepad, if you have access to a graphical desktop environment). Nano is probably the most beginner-friendly of the terminal-based text editors. To start editing a file in nano, type nano <FILENAME> from the command line, and you will begin editing a file called <FILENAME>, which will be written to the disk once you save it.

If you simply want to create an empty file which does not already exist and do nothing at all with it, you can use the "touch" command in the form of: touch <FILENAME>.