Creating resources (mkdir and touch)

Beyond navigating, you will frequently need to organize your workspace by creating new folders (directories) and empty files in the terminal.

Creating Folders: mkdir

To create a new folder, use the command:

mkdir [folder_name]

This command stands for Make Directory. For instance, mkdir documents will create a folder named documents in your current directory.

Creating Nested Paths with -p

If you try to create a folder inside a directory that does not exist yet (e.g. projects/javascript/2026), the command will fail and display an error.

To instruct Linux to automatically create any missing intermediate parent directories, use the -p option:

mkdir -p projects/javascript/2026

Creating Empty Files: touch

To create an empty file, or to update the modification timestamp of an existing file, use the command:

touch [file_name]

For example, typing touch app.js creates a blank text file with that name in the current folder.

Usage Examples and Common Errors

If you try to create a file using touch inside a folder that does not exist yet, you will receive an error:

touch ghost_folder/index.html
# Output:
# touch: cannot touch 'ghost_folder/index.html': No such file or directory

In this case, you must first create the directory structure and then create the file:

mkdir ghost_folder
touch ghost_folder/index.html

If a folder already exists, running mkdir without -p will generate an error:

mkdir projects
# Output:
# mkdir: cannot create directory 'projects': File exists

Try it yourself

Exercise 1: Create a projects folder

Exercise 2: Nested structure

Exercise 3: Create an empty file