Shell and DoC Systems

Let’s create the file ~/modules/shell/USERNAME.txt (replacing USERNAME with your own username, naturally).

Make sure that this file has the permissions -rw-r--r-- (i.e. only you can write to it, but everyone can read it).

Now we want to copy this file to the /tmp directory on your machine.

But what is /tmp? It is the “temporary directory”, where programs and users can store files which are only needed temporarily.

So how do we copy files? We use the cp command from the first session (remember you can use man cp to see details about the cp command):

username@MACHINE:~$ cp path/to/original.txt path/to/destination.txt

Here we have copied one file, located at path/to/original.txt, to a new location, path/to/destination.txt.

cp can only be used to copy files within the machine you’re currently working on. We’ll see how to copy files between machines soon!

Exercise 2

1. Create the file ~/modules/shell/USERNAME.txt (using your own username). Edit the file to add a message for your neighbour.
2. Copy the file to the /tmp directory on your computer.
3. Use ls to check that the file has been successfully copied.