🚀 go-pugleaf

ian@overhere30.freeserve.co.uk (007***) writes:

> I'd try anything if I new how to get past localhost root# or what to type 
> whist at that prompt (black screen).

It looks like you've logged in as root and are staring at the command
line.  For starters its reccomended that you use a user other than
root to do routine things like work as that would prevent you from
accidently hosing your system. How to add a user depends on your
system. On my Debian system I'd type

 adduser richard

and answer the questions - then log off and log on again as richard.

Anyway - when logged in as a user there are all the normal command
line things you can do. A basic one for example is:

 ls

to get a listing of files in the current directory. If it gives nothing
try "ls -a". 

If your shell (the command prompt program) is not set up to tell you
what directory you're currently in you can get it with

 pwd

If you have the manuals installed you may find some of the following
useful. You can get at them with the man command.

 man ls
 man man
 man bash

If you have X-windows (the graphical bit) set up then the xman command
may provide hours of entertaining reading (erm...). See if the
"startx" command does anything useful.

You can change directory with the "cd" command. To get back where you
came from the "cd -" command goes back. UNIXs like Linux have user
home directories where all your documents go. To get back to your home
directory try "cd ~".  Other aliases work such as "cd ~/MyDocuments"
assuming you have a directory called MyDocuments in your home
directory. To look in someone else's directory (assuming they have
given you permission) try "cd ~user".

A nice feature of the way UNIX shells work is that its the shell not
the "cd" command thats translating ~ and * and whatever else. This
makes it far easier to write programs and makes things behave
consistantly for a user's favourite shell.  I can't say I've found the
same under Windows. Another really nice feature is tab completion. If
you're using bash under Linux (most likely) it should be set up. Try
starting to enter a filename and hitting the TAB key once or twice
part way through.

The shell is very powerful - the bash manual page should give a lot of
information. For a slightly less tame example I could delete all compiled
Java programs in my ~/Java directory with the following command (which is
one of many possible ways to do it)

rm -i $(find ~/Java -name '*.class')

The -i option on rm is interactive mode so it will ask before deleting.

Of course you can also use the shell to launch programs such as vi, emacs,
pine, strn and so forth.

 - Richard.

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   _/_/_/  _/_/_/  _/_/_/ Richard Corfield <Richard@Littondale.freeserve.co.uk>
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