From owner-freebsd-newbies Mon Oct 5 12:17:51 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id MAA08595 for freebsd-newbies-outgoing; Mon, 5 Oct 1998 12:17:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from dt053nb4.san.rr.com (dt053nb4.san.rr.com [204.210.34.180]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA08572 for ; Mon, 5 Oct 1998 12:17:43 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from Studded@dal.net) Received: from dal.net (Studded@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by dt053nb4.san.rr.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA21948; Mon, 5 Oct 1998 12:13:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from Studded@dal.net) Message-ID: <36191A6F.DA1B1D9@dal.net> Date: Mon, 05 Oct 1998 12:13:51 -0700 From: Studded Organization: Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.06 [en] (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2.7-STABLE-0929 i386) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Steve Friedrich CC: "freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG" Subject: Re: First commands References: <199810051421.KAA10542@laker.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Steve Friedrich wrote: > At the top of the list, IMHO, should be apropos (yea, like anyone will > remember how to spell it ;o) On most BSD's 'apropos' and 'whatis' do basically the same thing (which actually is unfortunate because they are intended to do slightly different but equally valuable functions). > Much of this material is already covered quite nicely in Greg's book. > Why do we need to create more documentation that won't be read? Some people aren't happy with a project unless it's their own original work. However I'm all for anything that produces good documentation. Marty Poulin wrote: > I'd add tail and grep to the list (with a good explanation of what exactly > grep does - I'm still not entirely sure) Grep is a *wonderful* tool, and is well worth taking the time to learn. The basic concept is that you use grep to find a word or phrase in a file or group of files. I use it literally dozens of times a day. Let's say that you get a weird error message that you don't understand and you want to find out where in the code that error comes from. cd /usr/src grep -iR "exact copy of weird error message" * The -i flag uses a case insensitive search, and the -R flag means to recurse down into the directory structure from /usr/src/ down. Once you've found out where that error occurs it might lead you to a solution to your problem. The quotes are needed around the phrase to tell grep that you are searching for those words as a unit. Another thing grep is good for is finding everything BUT a certain thing. Say for example that you want to find out what lines in your inetd.conf file are not commented out. Use, 'grep -v ^# /etc/inetd.conf' and you will get the list. The -v option tells grep to show every line that does not have the pattern. The ^ character stands for the beginning of the line, and the # is the literal # character. Hope this helps, Doug -- *** Chief Operations Officer, DALnet IRC network *** Go PADRES! To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message