I lack a lot of knowledge regarding the subject so please excuse me if my question is very ignorant.

I just started out with RSA key authentication to my test-server. It did not work at the beginning and I tried and tried and re-tried to no avail.

Then I realised, I was creating "mkdir ~/.ssh" and then "mkdir ~/.ssh/authorized_keys" before placing the id_rsa.pub into the latter folder, which did not work.

My question is:

How can id_rsa.pub be placed in "authorized_keys", which is not created by "mkdir" therefore not a folder?

Thank you.