Unix Shell Connection FAQ
1. How do I change my password?
2. How do I use the 'man' pages?
4. I keep getting 'Permission Denied' or 'Access Denied' messages when I FTP.
5. What's wrong with the quota system? I can go over 10 megs.
6. How do I say something witty when someone 'fingers' me?
7. I have a file called 'something.tar.Z How do I extract it?
1. How do
I change my password?
At the shell prompt, type "passwd". You will be prompted
for you old password and then permitted to type in a new password. You
will type in your new password twice to make sure no it was entered correctly.
When you are typing in your old/new password, it will NOT be echoed back
to the screen for security purposes.
2. How do I use the 'man' pages?
'man page' is short for "Manual Page". Some versions of the UNIX operating system have manual pages online. To view a man page, type the following command:
man command
Where command is the name of the command you want more information on.
To keep this message from appearing, you must type this:
rm -f filename
Where filename is the name of the file you want deleted.
4. I keep
getting 'Permission Denied' or 'Access Denied' messages when I FTP.
Make sure you start the ftp program in a directory you
have write access to, such as your home directory. If you have wondered
out of you home directory then you can return to your home directory by
typing:
cd ~
5. What's
wrong with the quota system. I can go over 10 megs.
There is nothing wrong with it. Quotas have a "hard limit"
and a "soft limit". The system will let you go over the soft limit for
a little while, but it will never let you go over the hard limit.
Additional space is available from GDN for $2 a megabyte per month.
6. How
do I say something witty when someone 'fingers' me?
You must do the following things to have a "plan":
- Create a file called ".plan" in your home directory, containing what you want displayed.
- The ".plan" file must be world-readable; execute the following command:
chmod 755 .plan
7. I have
a file called 'something.tar.Z How do I extract it?
Here is how you extract assuming the original file is called
"foo.tar.Z":
gunzip foo.tar
tar xvf foo.tar
There are other variations on this theme. Files with the extension ".tar.gz" can be extracted just as above. Files with the extension".gz" can be uncompressed as follows:
gunzip filename.gz
Finally, files ending
simply in ".tar" can be extracted like this:
tar xvf filename.tar
It is important to remember that ".gz" and ".Z" files are merely compressed, whereas ".tar" files are archives of other files, somewhat like ZIP files in DOS.
8. My PINE
mail folder is getting BIG!
You need to either erase the entire file (mail/saved-messages),
or manually go through with pine, select that folder (with l), and manually
delete each message you want to get rid of.