Creating a text file in Linux

In Unix, everything is a file. In this particular case though we will be demonstrating how to create a text file. Of course, these are some of the many ways of creating a file

touch

Just touch it! – touch command followed by some file name and a file will magically appear.

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$ ls linuxfreelancer
ls: cannot access 'linuxfreelancer': No such file or directory
 
$ touch linuxfreelancer
 
$ $ ls -l linuxfreelancer 
-rw-rw-r-- 1 daniel daniel 0 Feb  8 16:53 linuxfreelancer

vi

vi or any text editor. In fact, any process which writes to a file.

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$ vi linuxfreelancer

Save with “:wq” in vi to save the file.

cat

Write multi-line text with “Here Document” syntax in bash.

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$ cat <<EOF>linuxfreelancer
my blog is at https://www.linuxfreelancer.com
EOF
 
$ cat linuxfreelancer
my blog is at https://www.linuxfreelancer.com
$

echo

The echo command with some redirection –

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$ echo 'My blog is at https://linuxfreelancer.com' > linuxfreelancer
 
$ cat linuxfreelancer
My blog is at https://linuxfreelancer.com

Redirection

You can redirect the output of any command to a new file

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$ ps > ps.output
$ cat ps.output
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
 2703 pts/0    00:00:00 bash
 3290 pts/0    00:00:00 ps

tee

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$ tee linuxfreelancer
Writing for my blog linuxfreelancer.com
Writing for my blog linuxfreelancer.com
...Crl+X
 
$ cat linuxfreelancer 
Writing for my blog linuxfreelancer.com
 
$

Why does the tee command repeat what I typed? that is what it does – it reads from standard input and write to standard output and file at the same time.