Basic UNIX and DOS Commands

In the discussion on directories above the UNIX directory format was chosen to illustrate the ideas. Other computers use different formats. In this section there is a table of basic file operations and directory formats for two types of computer system: UNIX and DOS. More will be said about DOS later. In the table, f, f1 and f2 stand for file names.

Operation	UNIX	DOS
Edit File	vi f	ED f
Directory	ls f	DIR f
Type (screen)	cat f	TYPE f
Print (hardcopy)	lpr f	PRINT f
Copy f1 to f2	cp f1 f2	COPY f1 f2
Rename f1 to f2	mv f1 f2	REN f1 f2
Delete	rm	DEL
Absolute Directories	/smith/sno/	$\backslash$SMITH$\backslash$SNO$\backslash$
Relative Directories	current/ ../pdk/	CURRENT$\backslash$ ..$\backslash$PDK$\backslash$
Create Directory	mkdir sno	MD SNO
Delete Directory	rmdir sno	RD SNO

As can be seen from this table, DOS directories and UNIX directories are very similar.