Commanding Linux
Grandad December 19th, 2008
Are there any Linux nerds out there?
The reason I ask is that I found a PC or something on The Other Fella’s laptop.
I came down this morning and found that he had left it on all night and I could run all his programmes. One of them was a little program called Putty. I assumed it was something to do with holding Windows together, but it just displayed little things like ‘[root@server /] #’.
Now I haven’t a clue what it was, but I tried typing in various things like ‘who are you’, and it told me it was ‘root pts/0’ which was very helpful!
I tried typing ‘what are you’ but it started to get violent. It said ‘-bash: what: command not found’
Then it occurred to me to try some of those Linuxey things, so I tried CHMOD. That seemed to do something because streams of letters and words shot up the screen.
I played with CHMOD for a while, but it’s a bit boring.
I tried CHOWN.
That did strange things but that was boring too, and anyway, I had to go out to meet someone.
They were the only two things I had seen The Other Fella use, so does anyone know any interesting things I could try out?
I wonder if there are any games on it?
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PuTTY is like the Unix version of Telnet. I don’t know much about either. We have a couple of Unix servers knocking around here and like yourself I’ve Bash-ed and Chmodded them but most of the time I haven’t a clue what to do with them. Anytime they break, a procession of people in Black Cowls carrying upside down crucifixes and black candles march into our Datacentre and after some really loud chanting, the servers work again. There is this site, but you’d want to be a right NERD!
http://www.asandler.com/jokes/computer/unixjoke.shtml
First things first. The laptop seems to be running as or logged in as ‘root’. My first suggestion would be to log out as root. Do it, do it now! ‘root’ is the highest priority user in the system and the system will allow you to do anything, and I mean ANYTHING, as root. You could chown some files you shouldn’t or delete some files you shouldn’t leave the laptop inoperable.
If you can login as a regular user, then you have more options. But in putty, not many games can be played. Try typing in ‘fortune’ and see if it takes you anywhere
Jack – I don’t think we have anyone around here with black cowls or candles which is a pity. Maybe I should kit myself out? Could you please send me a recording of their chants so I can learn how to do it? Thanks for that list. I’ll try it when Yer Man is out again.
Semantic – Root sounds great! I want to be able to do anything, so why should I deny myself? It’s a pretty useless yoke if there are no games there though…….
Hmmm. If anyone suggests you use commands like ‘rm -rf’ or ‘fdisk’ don’t.
You could try ‘nice’, that’s always polite?
‘man’ works, but ‘woman’ doesn’t for some reason.
To look at anything you need cat, if you’re just interested in the end of things, use tail.
To change something vi is handy, to change everything sed is the business.
ps to find out what’s going on, and kill what you don’t like.
man will just get you into trouble, not out of it!
Hope that’s helpful!
Thrifty – ‘rm -rf’ and ‘fdisk’? Thanks. I’ll try those.
“‘man’ works, but ‘woman’ doesn’t for some reason.”
No surprise there.
Neighbour – I can’t have cat because of the dog. Can you actually kill things with Linux? Brilliant!!!
There is a great game there called mv.
You can run it as follows:
‘mv /sbin /dev/null’ – Without the quotes of course..
It’s a bit slow to start but it’s great once it gets going.
Robert – At last! A game. I’ll get up early tomorrow and hope he has left his laptop on again.
or you could have a chat with Keiron – he knows about this one….
or just change /boot/grub/menu.lst so the menu items are pointing to the wrong options. That’s fun all by it’s self. mv is just too obvious!
so: either nano /boot/grub/menu.lst
or instead of nano use pico.
Then watch as the swaring begins!
Ooooo, I bet The Other Fellow is going to be getting a lot of nasty calls from upset customers in the morning…
…oh…wait….
…seems like he already has. Keep forgetting about the time difference.
And ‘fdisk’ is a fine one it is. But like drinking petrol and swallowing a match, you can only do it once.
Why not just sell it to some tourist down the village?
Fer fucks sake……..
I’m very much in the dark on this one. I haven’t a clue about Linux. I did manage to successfully remove it from a laptop, but I’m not sure that’s much of an achievement.
My favorite was always “would you like to play a game?”
grub/menu sounds good.
In my world, Putty is the portal to connect to Redbrick and spend hours logged in and not chatting with other Brickies at all…