Create a file from terminal in Linux
David Y.
—The Problem
How can I create a new file from a Linux terminal window (i.e. shell)?
The Solution
The simplest way to do this is by using the touch command:
touch new-file.txt
This will create an empty file with the provided name in the current directory.
To create a file containing some text, we can redirect the output of a command using the > operator:
echo "Hello world" > hello-world.txt
We can also do this interactively using cat:
cat > new-file.txt
After pressing Enter, we can type some text for the file contents. Once we’re done, pressing Enter and then Ctrl+D will save and close the file.
Finally, we can create a new file using a terminal-based text editor such as vi or nano:
vi filename.txt
nano filename.txt
Note that this last method will only create a file if we save before exiting (:w in vi or Ctrl+O in nano).
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