The Terminal
Hemingray, Nice to hear from you too. Im not arround as much and have been doing to travling for work lately.
You dont have to be affraid of the Terminal. Yes you can trash most of your drive with a single command but only if you are logged in a root. Plus... once the util that is doing to deleting, delets its self, no more recursive delete. You can do some damage as an admin user as well.. but only to your own files and applications, not OS stuff. Basicly you just want to watch what you type. and what flags you use when you run them. Here are some dagorous ones that you want to becarfull with:
# rm
This comand removes files. It will only trash a file if you have privleges to do so. If you use the -r flag, you will reccursively trash every thing in your current dirctory or if you use a wild card option
example
# rm -r evilFiles*
this will trash all files in the current directory that starts with "evildFiles"
the -f flag is a force, you can use this t trash directorys. with out it you cant do it.
exaple
# rm -rf /evildeadsStuff
now.... you want to use rm very carfully.
# cat your can use cat to dump the contents of a file to the screen or to another file. becarfull when you do this when dumping to a file. you dont want to over wite a system configuration file with your shopping list.
exapple
# cat ShoppingList > ImportantSTuff
> is for write from begining of file
>> if for append
# chmod, and chown (I talked about this in an above post)
# rmdir is if a prety safe command.. it only trashes empty directories.
# vi
is a text edditor .. dont use it if you dont know how. You dont want to get in to a place where you have changed something in a important file and you dont know how to NOT save your changes. Paly with it on new Test files.
#passwd <username>
this changes the password for a user... if you change your root password, dont forget it.
I cant think of any other ones that you could do any real damage with at the moment. Just remeber to look at the man pages before you use a command and look up what flages to what.
# man <commandName>
hit the spacebar or return key to scrole.
have fun with the terminal. Trashing a system is the best way to learn about a system. I have a partition on my drive just for playing with test systems. I currently have 10.2b on it. If I blow it up... I dont care.
Welcome to UNIX!
-evildead
