Viewing the file type

You can determine a file’s type by using the file command. For example, if you want to determine the type of the file /var, you can run:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ file /var
/var: directory

And as you would expect, the output shows that /var is a directory. If you want to show the type of the facts.txt file, you can run:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ file facts.txt 
facts.txt: ASCII text

The output shows that facts.txt is an ASCII text file.

Your computer doesn’t understand human language (letters), just numbers! And so each character in the English language is translated to a number. Your computer sees any text file as just a bunch of numbers piled together!

Now let’s create a soft link named soft.txt to the facts.txt file:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ ln -s...