CLI for Noobies: A Primer on the Linux Command Line

Chapter 3. All About Files

This chapter is all about files and the commands that love them: or at least know them, copy them, move them, and remove them. Files are special, and this is the first of three chapters about them.

What Kind of File Is This?

The first file-related command we’ll talk about is file. The basic format of the file command is shown below.

linux~>file <filename>

In response, file tells you everything it can about what type of file “filename” is. More on that in a second, but first this pause for Info.

As you learned in Chapter 1, everything to the left of the ~> is the prompt. The prompt is followed by the command itself, in this case, that’s file, which is followed in turn by its arguments. Whenever an argument is shown inside ...