Issue creating a regular file for a directory

Question

I have tried this but it is not working

touch dir_practice ../cambridge/library/ 
touch dir_practice  ./sample_dir/cambridge/library/**** 

Answer 1

If you look at the man page for touch, you'll see that it takes a filename as an argument. So what you need is:

touch ../cambridge/library/dir_practice

Since you're new to this, let's break this down. A relative pathname is a path specified relative to your current location. Contrast this with an absolute pathname, which starts from the root (/).

So you start at sample_dir/oxford. The first .. takes you back to the sample_dir directory. Then, you want to go to the library directory, which is inside the cambridge directory. Inside the library directory, you want to create the file named dir_practice.

Put all that together, and you get ../ + cambridge/library/ + dir_practice. Together, that's ../cambridge/library/dir_practice. This is the argument we pass to the touch command.