So in the last post we talked about the command echo. Now we’re going to use it to create a file. At your terminal prompt, do:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ echo "Hi there" >myfile

This took the output from the command echo “Hi there” and put it in a file called myfile. To see the contents of myfile, do:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ cat myfile

On your terminal screen will appear:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ cat myfile
Hi there

So the command cat can show you the contents of a file. But how do we know what files we have? That’s where the command ls comes in. If we execute ls, we see:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ ls
myfile

The ls command lists the files you have. In the next blog post we’ll talk about directories, which are the containers of the files.