#Unix edit text file in terminal how to

Similarly, if it says M-A for Append, use Alt + M (M means Alt key). If it says ^K for Cut, use Ctrl+K (^ means Ctrl key). Nano shows the useful keyboard shortcuts at the bottom all the time. Here is a demonstration of how both of these above-discussed functions work in Nano: That will save your changes to the file and close Nano. The file name will be confirmed, leave it unchanged and press 'Enter'. Pressing it will prompt you 'Save modified buffer?' since we want to save it, press 'Y'. In case you want to save and quit, use the Ctrl + x key combination. In case you don't want to change the name or path of the file, simply press 'Enter'. This is essentially the 'Save As' operation you see in most text editors. Pressing Ctrl + o will ask you the name of the file you wish to save it as. The normal convention is to use Ctrl + s key combination to save your work, but in Nano, the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl + o. Here is a graphical demonstration where I edit the previously opened 'demo-file.txt' file in nano.Īs you can see, this is quite effortless and easy to use! Save and close files To cut a line, press the Ctrl + k key combination, and to paste, press the Ctrl + u key combination. Text can be selected using the normal click-and-drag mouse operation. You can move the cursor left, right, up down using the respective arrow keys. The interface of nano is quite straightforward. To edit it using nano, I would run the following command: nano demo-file.txtĪs you can see in the attached GIF, I opened 'demo-file.txt' in nano. Let's assume that I have a file named 'demo-file.txt' in my current directory. Running the nano command, along with a specified filename will open that particular file in the nano editor. The syntax to open a file to edit in nano is as follows: nano FILENAME Using the nano editorĪmong all the terminal based text editors I know, nano is the easiest to use for beginners. Replace 'FILENAME' with the name (or location) of your file. Nano is a terminal based text editor which is simple and easy to use. You can open an existing or new file for editing in the Ubuntu command line like this: nano FILENAME Ubuntu being a beginner-friendly distribution comes preinstalled with a beginner-friendly text editor called Nano. There are several such text editors available for Linux. You have to edit files using command line text editors. Sounds scary, right? Unfortunately, you cannot avoid it. You don't have the comfort of the GUI here and you have to use the editor with keyboard shortcuts. Or echo $'First line. Second line. Third line.' >foo.txtĪnother possibility is to group commands.Editing files is easy with a regular GUI text editor like Notepad, VS Code, etc.īut when you are stuck to the Linux terminal and have to edit files in the command line, things are not the same. You can use a string literal containing newlines. printf '%s ' 'First line.' 'Second line.' 'Third line.' >foo.txt If you want to write multiple lines, here are a few possibilities. For example, the following command creates a file called foo.txt containing the line Hello, world. The basic way to create a file with the shell is with output redirection. See What is the exact difference between a 'terminal', a 'shell', a 'tty' and a 'console'?

#Unix edit text file in terminal how to

If you meant using the command line, then you are asking how to create a file using the shell. Just invoke any non-GUI editor ( emacs -nw, joe, nano, vi, vim, …). You can use an application running in a terminal. You can't use a terminal to create a file.