On Unix-like operating systems, the two most common types of files are regular files and directories.

Regular files are raw files used to store all kinds of data such as text, images, audio, video, scripts, programs, etc.

Directories, also called folders, are a filesystem structure which contains references to other files and possibly other directories, generally called entries.

Creating regular files

To create one or more empty regular files, you can use the touch command as follows:

$ touch file ...

Where file ... is a list of paths to the files you want to create, separated by a space character.

Example

For example, this command will create a new empty regular file named index.html into the current directory:

$ touch index.html

This command will create a new empty regular files named guests.txt into the Documents directory:

$ touch ~/Documents/guests.txt

And this command will create two new empty regular files named login.js and signup.js into the controllers directory:

$ touch ./controllers/login.js ./controllers/signup.js

File extensions in Unix