Article

An Introduction To Using The Command Line Interface To Work With Files And Directories

By: AVP
October 25, 2014

With the increasing ingest of born digital and digitized collections, we are at the point (perhaps well past the point) of admitting that almost all archives are digital archives, and as a profession we must identify and gain training on the tools that will help us describe, store, and manage file-based collections in the same ways we do with physical collections.

The Command Line Interface (CLI) is a critical tool here, both for managing files from ingest to storage directly or being able to access certain applications that only have a CLI option for running. These introductions to CLI (both for Mac and Windows OS) provide a basic understanding of managing directories and files with the command line, skills which can be expanded from managing individual files to ingesting and caring for large sets of files in batches in order to save time and address the realities of file-based acquisition.