Tutorial3: Advanced File Management / Quoting Special Characters

ADVANCED UNIX / LINUX FILE MANAGEMENT

Main Objectives of this Practice Tutorial

• Understand the difference between absolute / relative / relative-to-home pathnames

• Become productive using various pathname types for Unix/Linux File Management

• Understand the following Ambiguous Filename expansion (FNE) Symbols: * / ? / [ ] / [! ]

• Become productive using FNE for Unix/Linux File Management

• Understanding quotation symbols: Backslash \ , single quotes ' ' , double quotes " "

• Understand the purpose of quoting special characters for File Management and issuing Linux commands

Tutorial Reference Material

Course Notes	Pathname Type / Filename Expansion / Quoting Reference		YouTube Videos
Course Notes: PDF | PPTX	Pathname Types Absolute Relative Relative-to-home Ambiguous Filename Expansion Symbols Asterisk * , Question ? , Character Class [ ] and [! ]	Quotation Symbols Backslash \ , Single ' ' , Double " "	Instructional Videos: Using Pathname Types Filename Expansion Quoting Special Characters

Pathname Types

A pathname is a fully-specified location of a unique filename within the file system.

The concept of a pathname relates to every operating system including Unix, Linux, MS-DOS, MS-Windows, Apple-Macintosh, etc.

It is important to understand file pathnames since you need to save or access a file without ambiguity because there may be several files by that name in various directories. For example: Accessing the cars.txt file - which file to access? It depends on the location of the file

/home/userid/uli101/cars.txt

/public/uli101/samples/cars.txt

/etc/data/cars.txt

Absolute Pathnames

An absolute pathname begins from the root, which is / (forward slash) This is called absolute because it is specified the same, and locates a specific file, regardless of your current directory For example: mkdir /home/someuser/uli101 will create the uli101 directory in the home directory of user someuser

Relative Pathnames

x

Relative-to-home Pathnames

x

Ambiguous Filename Expansion=

x

Quoting Special Characters

x

INVESTIGATION 1: ABSOLUTE / RELATIVE / RELATIVE-TO-HOME PATHNAMES

X

Perform the Following Steps:

1. X

INVESTIGATION 2: FILENAME EXPANSION

x

Perform the following steps:

1. X

INVESTIGATION 3: QUOTING SPECIAL CHARACTERS

x

Perform the Following Steps:

1. X

LINUX PRACTICE QUESTIONS

The purpose of this section is to obtain extra practice to help with your assignment #1, quizzes, your midterm, and your final ezam.

Here is a link to the MS Word Document of ALL of the questions displayed below but with extra room to answer on the document to simulate a quiz:

https://ict.senecacollege.ca/~murray.saul/uli101/uli101_week3_practice.docx

Your instructor may take-up these questions during class. It is up to the student to attend classes in order to obtain the answers to the following questions. Your instructor will NOT provide these answers in any other form (eg. e-mail, etc).

Review Questions:

1. X
2. X
3. X
4. X
5. X
6. X
7. X
8. X