Task 1 - Practice Terminal Commands#

For this task, you will be reproducing a particular directory structure with a series of files and folders, similar to what we did in class.

Installing Tree#

In case you missed the installation instructions to install tree, they are linked here:

  • On Windows, if you cannot find the tree command, please follow the instructions in the setup guide.

  • On Linux or macOS, you may need to install tree (if you didn’t already do it in the dungeon) with: conda install -c conda-forge tree.

A. Create Directory Structure#

The files should be named and structured the same way, but you can leave them empty if you want.

../../../_images/dir.png

Hint: Start by creating a directory called Task1 in your lab directory, using the command:

mkdir Task1

If you followed the suggested directory structure, this directory should be here: ~/school/year3/data301/lab2-github-username/Task1

You may need the following commands:

  • cd : change directory

  • pwd : print working directory

  • mkdir: make directory (note the -p option)

  • ls: list directory contents

  • touch: create an empty file with a specific name

  • code: edit the file in Visual Studio Code

B. Run tree#

In this task (after you create the directory structure in Task 1A), we will use the tree command to output the directory structure inside your lab1 directory.

First, open a Terminal and run the following command inside your lab1 directory:

cd Task1
tree

You should get an output that looks something like this in your Terminal:

.
├── level1A
│   ├── file1.md
│   └── level2A
│       ├── file2.md
│       └── level3A
│           └── file3.md
├── level1B
│   ├── level2B
│   │   └── newfile2.md
│   └── newfile1.md
└── root.md

5 directories, 6 files

C. Save the output of tree to a file#

To redirect the output of any command into a file, you can use the > command. Let’s do that for the tree command:

tree > directory_tree.txt

There should now be a new file in your Task1 directory called directory_tree.txt.

D. Add, commit, and push your changes to GitHub#

You are encouraged to commit, add and push intermediate changes in your repository, just remember to add a useful commit message.

git add .
git commit -m "Finished creating the directory structure."
git push

Note: Empty directories will not show up on GitHub.com so each directory must have a file in it (even if it is empty).

You are now ready to move on to Task 2!