Now, the same echo command with output redirection:

$ echo "firstfile" > copyme

The greater-than sign tells the shell to write echo's output to a file called copyme. This file will be created if it doesn't exist, and will be overwritten if it does exist. By typing ls -l, we can see that the copyme file is 10 bytes long, since it contains the word firstfile and the newline character:

$ ls -l copyme
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root           10 Dec 28 14:13 copyme