The Command Line · Lesson 3 of 6

Making & Removing Things

A free lesson from Swipe Coding · Ship It, level 1 · updated October 2026

By the Swipe team, founded by Colin · how we make lessons

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mkdir makes folders, touch makes empty files — the two commands you'll use to start almost every project. 📁

Beyond navigating, you'll constantly need to create and clear away files and folders. mkdir ("make directory") creates a new folder. touch creates a new, empty file (its original purpose was updating a file's timestamp, but creating an empty file with it became the everyday habit). Both take the name of what you want to create as an argument — extra text typed right after the command.

$ mkdir my-project
$ cd my-project
$ touch index.js
$ ls
index.js

Creating a new folder, moving into it, then creating an empty file inside it.

To delete things, rm ("remove") deletes a file, and rm -r ("recursive") deletes a folder along with everything inside it. This is the one command in this whole lesson to treat with real caution: unlike deleting through your file explorer, the terminal has no recycle bin or trash — rm deletes immediately and permanently.

$ rm old-notes.txt
$ rm -r old-folder

rm deletes a single file; rm -r deletes a folder and everything inside it, permanently.

True or false

Files deleted with rm in the terminal go to a recycle bin or trash folder, just like deleting them normally.

A few small letters after a command like this, written with a dash, are called flags (or options) — they change how the command behaves. -r on rm means "recursive: apply this to the folder and everything inside it". Most commands support several flags, and you can usually see them by adding --help after the command name, e.g. rm --help.

Fill in the blank

Running rm -r on a folder deletes it and everything inside it ____ — there is no recycle bin to recover it from.

Quick check

What does the mkdir command do?

Chapter quiz