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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQS);faqs.536
Fgrep still has its uses though, and may be useful when searching
a file for a larger number of strings than egrep can handle.
egrep = "Extended GREP"
egrep uses fancier regular expressions than grep. Many people
use egrep all the time, since it has some more sophisticated
internal algorithms than grep or fgrep, and is usually the
fastest of the three programs.
cat = "CATenate"
catenate is an obscure word meaning "to connect in a series",
which is what the "cat" command does to one or more files. Not
to be confused with C/A/T, the Computer Aided Typesetter.
gecos = "General Electric Comprehensive Operating System"
When GE's large systems division was sold to Honeywell,
Honeywell dropped the "E" from "GECOS".
Unix's password file has a "pw_gecos" field. The name is a
real holdover from the early days. Dennis Ritchie has reported:
"Sometimes we sent printer output or batch jobs
to the GCOS machine. The gcos field in the password file
was a place to stash the information for the $IDENT card.
Not elegant."
nroff = "New ROFF"
troff = "Typesetter new ROFF"
These are descendants of "roff", which was a re-implementation
of the Multics "runoff" program (a program that you'd use to
"run off" a good copy of a document).
tee = T
From plumbing terminology for a T-shaped pipe splitter.
bss = "Block Started by Symbol"
Dennis Ritchie says:
Actually the acronym (in the sense we took it up; it may
have other credible etymologies) is "Block Started by
Symbol." It was a pseudo-op in FAP (Fortran Assembly [-er?]
Program), an assembler for the IBM 704-709-7090-7094
machines. It defined its label and set aside space for a
given number of words. There was another pseudo-op, BES,
"Block Ended by Symbol" that did the same except that the
label was defined by the last assigned word + 1. (On these
machines Fortran arrays were stored backwards in storage
and were 1-origin.)
The usage is reasonably appropriate, because just as with
standard Unix loaders, the space assigned didn't have to be
punched literally into the object deck but was represented
by a count somewhere.
biff = "BIFF"
This command, which turns on asynchronous mail notification,
was actually named after a dog at Berkeley.
I can confirm the origin of biff, if you're interested.
Biff was Heidi Stettner's dog, back when Heidi (and I, and
Bill Joy) were all grad students at U.C. Berkeley and the
early versions of BSD were being developed. Biff was
popular among the residents of Evans Hall, and was known
for barking at the mailman, hence the name of the command.
Confirmation courtesy of Eric Cooper, Carnegie Mellon University
rc (as in ".cshrc" or "/etc/rc") = "RunCom"
"rc" derives from "runcom", from the MIT CTSS system, ca. 1965.
'There was a facility that would execute a bunch of
commands stored in a file; it was called "runcom" for "run
commands", and the file began to be called "a runcom."
"rc" in Unix is a fossil from that usage.'
Brian Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie, as told to Vicki Brown
"rc" is also the name of the shell from the new Plan 9
operating system.
Perl = "Practical Extraction and Report Language"
The Perl language is Larry Wall's highly popular
freely-available completely portable text, process, and file
manipulation tool that bridges the gap between shell and C
programming (or between doing it on the command line and
pulling your hair out). For further information, see the
Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.perl.
Don Libes' book "Life with Unix" contains lots more of these
tidbits.
1.4) How does the gateway between "comp.unix.questions" and the
"info-unix" mailing list work?
"info-unix" and "unix-qizards" are mailing list versions of
comp.unix.questions and comp.unix.wizards respectively.
There should be no difference in content between the
mailing list and the newsgroup.
To get on or off either of these lists, send mail to
info-unix-request@brl.mil or unix-wizards-request@brl.mil.
Be sure to use the '-Request'. Don't expect an immediate response.
Here are the gory details, courtesy of the list's maintainer,
Bob Reschly.
==== postings to info-UNIX and UNIX-wizards lists ====
Anything submitted to the list is posted; I do not moderate
incoming traffic -- BRL functions as a reflector. Postings
submitted by Internet subscribers should be addressed to the list
address (info-UNIX or UNIX- wizards); the '-request' addresses
are for correspondence with the list maintainer [me]. Postings
submitted by USENET readers should be addressed to the
appropriate news group (comp.unix.questions or
comp.unix.wizards).
For Internet subscribers, received traffic will be of two types;
individual messages, and digests. Traffic which comes to BRL
from the Internet and BITNET (via the BITNET-Internet gateway) is
immediately resent to all addressees on the mailing list.
Traffic originating on USENET is gathered up into digests which
are sent to all list members daily.
BITNET traffic is much like Internet traffic. The main
difference is that I maintain only one address for traffic
destined to all BITNET subscribers. That address points to a list
exploder which then sends copies to individual BITNET
subscribers. This way only one copy of a given message has to
cross the BITNET-Internet gateway in either direction.
USENET subscribers see only individual messages. All messages
originating on the Internet side are forwarded to our USENET
machine. They are then posted to the appropriate newsgroup.
Unfortunately, for gatewayed messages, the sender becomes
"news@brl-adm". This is currently an unavoidable side-effect of
the software which performs the gateway function.
As for readership, USENET has an extremely large readership - I
would guess several thousand hosts and tens of thousands of
readers. The master list maintained here at BRL runs about two
hundred fifty entries with roughly ten percent of those being
local redistribution lists. I don't have a good feel for the
size of the BITNET redistribution, but I would guess it is
roughly the same size and composition as the master list.
Traffic runs 150K to 400K bytes per list per week on average.
1.5) What are some useful Unix or C books?
Mitch Wright (mitch@cirrus.com) maintains a useful list of Unix
and C books, with descriptions and some mini-reviews. There are
currently 77 titles on his list.
You can obtain a copy of this list by anonymous ftp from
ftp.wg.omron.co.jp (133.210.4.4), where it's
"pub/unix-faq/docs/Unix-C-Booklist". If you can't use anonymous
ftp, email the line "help" to "mailserv@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu" for
instructions on retrieving things via email.
Send additions or suggestions to mitch@cirrus.com.
1.6) What happened to the pronunciation list that used to be part of this
document?
From its inception in 1989, this FAQ document included a
comprehensive pronunciation list maintained by Maarten Litmaath
(thanks, Maarten!). (Does anyone know who *created* it?)
It has been retired, since it is not really relevant to the topic
of "Unix questions". You can still find it as part of the
widely-distributed "Jargon" file (maintained by Eric S. Raymond,
eric@snark.thyrsus.com) which seems like a much more appropriate
forum for the topic of "How do you pronounce /* ?"
If you'd like a copy, you can ftp one from ftp.wg.omron.co.jp
(133.210.4.4), it's "pub/unix-faq/docs/Pronunciation-Guide".
--
Ted Timar - tmatimar@empress.com
Empress Software, 3100 Steeles Ave E, Markham, Ont., Canada L3R 8T3
Xref: bloom-picayune.mit.edu comp.unix.questions:51338 comp.unix.shell:8344 news.answers:4780
Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!usenet
From: tmatimar@empress.com (Ted M A Timar)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.shell,news.answers
Subject: Unix - Frequently Asked Questions (2/7) [Frequent posting]
Supersedes: <unix-faq/faq/part2_723967331@athena.mit.edu>
Followup-To: comp.unix.questions
Date: 24 Dec 1992 06:03:20 GMT
Organization: Empress Software
Lines: 837
Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu
Distribution: world
Expires: 21 Jan 1993 06:02:09 GMT
Message-ID: <unix-faq/faq/part2_725176929@athena.mit.edu>
References: <unix-faq/faq/contents_725176929@athena.mit.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: pit-manager.mit.edu
X-Last-Updated: 1992/12/09
Archive-name: unix-faq/faq/part2
Version: $Id: part2,v 2.1 92/12/04 07:43:45 tmatimar Exp $
These seven articles contain the answers to some Frequently Asked
Questions often seen in comp.unix.questions and comp.unix.shell.
Please don't ask these questions again, they've been answered plenty
of times already - and please don't flame someone just because they may
not have read this particular posting. Thank you.
These articles are divided approximately as follows:
1.*) General questions.
2.*) Relatively basic questions, likely to be asked by beginners.
3.*) Intermediate questions.
4.*) Advanced questions, likely to be asked by people who thought
they already knew all of the answers.
5.*) Questions pertaining to the various shells, and the differences.
6.*) An overview of Unix variants.
7.*) An comparison of configuration management systems (RCS, SCCS).
This article includes answers to:
2.1) How do I remove a file whose name begins with a "-" ?
2.2) How do I remove a file with funny characters in the filename ?
2.3) How do I get a recursive directory listing?
2.4) How do I get the current directory into my prompt?
2.5) How do I read characters from the terminal in a shell script?
2.6) How do I rename "*.foo" to "*.bar", or change file names
to lowercase?
2.7) Why do I get [some strange error message] when I
"rsh host command" ?
2.8) How do I {set an environment variable, change directory} inside a
program or shell script and have that change affect my
current shell?
2.9) How do I redirect stdout and stderr separately in csh?
2.10) How do I tell inside .cshrc if I'm a login shell?
2.11) How do I construct a shell glob-pattern that matches all files
except "." and ".." ?
2.12) How do I find the last argument in a Bourne shell script?
2.13) What's wrong with having '.' in your $PATH ?
If you're looking for the answer to, say, question 2.5, and want to skip
everything else, you can search ahead for the regular expression "^2.5)".
While these are all legitimate questions, they seem to crop up in
comp.unix.questions or comp.unix.shell on an annual basis, usually
followed by plenty of replies (only some of which are correct) and then
a period of griping about how the same questions keep coming up. You
may also like to read the monthly article "Answers to Frequently Asked
Questions" in the newsgroup "news.announce.newusers", which will tell
you what "UNIX" stands for.
With the variety of Unix systems in the world, it's hard to guarantee
that these answers will work everywhere. Read your local manual pages
before trying anything suggested here. If you have suggestions or
corrections for any of these answers, please send them to to
tmatimar@empress.com.
2.1) How do I remove a file whose name begins with a "-" ?
Figure out some way to name the file so that it doesn't begin
with a dash. The simplest answer is to use
rm ./-filename
(assuming "-filename" is in the current directory, of course.)
This method of avoiding the interpretation of the "-" works with
other commands too.
Many commands, particularly those that have been written to use
the "getopt(3)" argument parsing routine, accept a "--" argument
which means "this is the last option, anything after this is not
an option", so your version of rm might handle "rm -- -filename".
Some versions of rm that don't use getopt() treat a single "-"
in the same way, so you can also try "rm - -filename".
2.2) How do I remove a file with funny characters in the filename ?
If the 'funny character' is a '/', skip to the last part of this
answer. If the funny character is something else, such as a ' '
or control character or character with the 8th bit set, keep reading.
The classic answers are
rm -i some*pattern*that*matches*only*the*file*you*want
which asks you whether you want to remove each file matching
the indicated pattern; depending on your shell, this may not
work if the filename has a character with the 8th bit set (the
shell may strip that off);
and
rm -ri .
which asks you whether to remove each file in the directory.
Answer "y" to the problem file and "n" to everything else.
Unfortunately this doesn't work with many versions of rm. Also
unfortunately, this will walk through every subdirectory of ".",
so you might want to "chmod a-x" those directories temporarily
to make them unsearchable.
Always take a deep breath and think about what you're doing and
double check what you typed when you use rm's "-r" flag or a
wildcard on the command line;
and
find . -type f ... -ok rm '{}' \;
where "..." is a group of predicates that uniquely identify the
file. One possibility is to figure out the inode number of the
problem file (use "ls -i .") and then use
find . -inum 12345 -ok rm '{}' \;
or
find . -inum 12345 -ok mv '{}' new-file-name \;
"-ok" is a safety check - it will prompt you for confirmation of
the command it's about to execute. You can use "-exec" instead
to avoid the prompting, if you want to live dangerously, or if
you suspect that the filename may contain a funny character
sequence that will mess up your screen when printed.
What if the filename has a '/' in it?
These files really are special cases, and can only be created by
buggy kernel code (typically by implementations of NFS that don't
filter out illegal characters in file names from remote
machines.) The first thing to do is to try to understand exactly
why this problem is so strange.
Recall that Unix directories are simply pairs of filenames and
inode numbers. A directory essentially contains information
like this:
filename inode
file1 12345
file2.c 12349
file3 12347
Theoretically, '/' and '\0' are the only two characters that
cannot appear in a filename - '/' because it's used to separate
directories and files, and '\0' because it terminates a filename.
Unfortunately some implementations of NFS will blithely create
filenames with embedded slashes in response to requests from
remote machines. For instance, this could happen when someone on
a Mac or other non-Unix machine decides to create a remote NFS
file on your Unix machine with the date in the filename. Your
Unix directory then has this in it:
filename inode
91/02/07 12357
No amount of messing around with 'find' or 'rm' as described
above will delete this file, since those utilities and all other
Unix programs, are forced to interpret the '/' in the normal way.
Any ordinary program will eventually try to do
unlink("91/02/07"), which as far as the kernel is concerned means
"unlink the file 07 in the subdirectory 02 of directory 91", but
that's not what we have - we have a *FILE* named "91/02/07" in
the current directory. This is a subtle but crucial distinction.
What can you do in this case? The first thing to try is to
return to the Mac that created this crummy entry, and see if you
can convince it and your local NFS daemon to rename the file to
something without slashes.
If that doesn't work or isn't possible, you'll need help from
your system manager, who will have to try the one of the
following. Use "ls -i" to find the inode number of this bogus
file, then unmount the file system and use "clri" to clear the
inode, and "fsck" the file system with your fingers crossed.
This destroys the information in the file. If you want to keep
it, you can try:
create a new directory in the same parent directory as the one
containing the bad file name;
move everything you can (i.e. everything but the file with the
bad name) from the old directory to the new one;
do "ls -id" on the directory containing the file with the bad
name to get its inumber;
umount the file system;
"clri" the directory containing the file with the bad name;
"fsck" the file system.
Then, to find the file,
remount the file system;
rename the directory you created to have the name of the old
directory (since the old directory should have been blown away
by "fsck")
move the file out of "lost+found" into the directory with a
better name.
Alternatively, you can patch the directory the hard way by
crawling around in the raw file system. Use "fsdb", if you
have it.
2.3) How do I get a recursive directory listing?
One of the following may do what you want:
ls -R (not all versions of "ls" have -R)
find . -print (should work everywhere)
du -a . (shows you both the name and size)
If you're looking for a wildcard pattern that will match all ".c"
files in this directory and below, you won't find one, but you
can use
% some-command `find . -name '*.c' -print`
"find" is a powerful program. Learn about it.
2.4) How do I get the current directory into my prompt?
It depends which shell you are using. It's easy with some
shells, hard or impossible with others.
C Shell (csh):
Put this in your .cshrc - customize the prompt variable the
way you want.
alias setprompt 'set prompt="${cwd}% "'
setprompt # to set the initial prompt
alias cd 'chdir \!* && setprompt'
If you use pushd and popd, you'll also need
alias pushd 'pushd \!* && setprompt'
alias popd 'popd \!* && setprompt'
Some C shells don't keep a $cwd variable - you can use
`pwd` instead.
If you just want the last component of the current directory
in your prompt ("mail% " instead of "/usr/spool/mail% ")
you can use
alias setprompt 'set prompt="$cwd:t% "'
Some older csh's get the meaning of && and || reversed.
Try doing:
false && echo bug
If it prints "bug", you need to switch && and || (and get
a better version of csh.)
Bourne Shell (sh):
If you have a newer version of the Bourne Shell (SVR2 or newer)
you can use a shell function to make your own command, "xcd" say:
xcd() { cd $* ; PS1="`pwd` $ "; }
If you have an older Bourne shell, it's complicated but not
impossible. Here's one way. Add this to your .profile file:
LOGIN_SHELL=$$ export LOGIN_SHELL
CMDFILE=/tmp/cd.$$ export CMDFILE
# 16 is SIGURG, pick a signal that's not likely to be used
PROMPTSIG=16 export PROMPTSIG
trap '. $CMDFILE' $PROMPTSIG
and then put this executable script (without the indentation!),
let's call it "xcd", somewhere in your PATH
: xcd directory - change directory and set prompt
: by signalling the login shell to read a command file
cat >${CMDFILE?"not set"} <<EOF
cd $1
PS1="\`pwd\`$ "
EOF
kill -${PROMPTSIG?"not set"} ${LOGIN_SHELL?"not set"}
Now change directories with "xcd /some/dir".
Korn Shell (ksh):
Put this in your .profile file:
PS1='$PWD $ '
If you just want the last component of the directory, use
PS1='${PWD##*/} $ '
T C shell (tcsh)
Tcsh is a popular enhanced version of csh with some extra
builtin variables (and many other features):
%~ the current directory, using ~ for $HOME
%d or %/ the full pathname of the current directory
%c or %. the trailing component of the current directory
so you can do
set prompt='%~ '
BASH (FSF's "Bourne Again SHell")
\w in $PS1 gives the full pathname of the current directory,
with ~ expansion for $HOME; \W gives the basename of
the current directory. So, in addition to the above sh and
ksh solutions, you could use
PS1='\w $ '
or
PS1='\W $ '
2.5) How do I read characters from the terminal in a shell script?
In sh, use read. It is most common to use a loop like
while read line
do
...
done
In csh, use $< like this:
while ( 1 )
set line = "$<"
if ( "$line" == "" ) break
...
end
Unfortunately csh has no way of distinguishing between a blank
line and an end-of-file.
If you're using sh and want to read a *single* character from the
terminal, you can try something like
echo -n "Enter a character: "
stty cbreak # or stty raw
readchar=`dd if=/dev/tty bs=1 count=1 2>/dev/null`
stty -cbreak
echo "Thank you for typing a $readchar ."
2.6) How do I rename "*.foo" to "*.bar", or change file names to lowercase?
Why doesn't "mv *.foo *.bar" work? Think about how the shell
expands wildcards. "*.foo" and "*.bar" are expanded before the
mv command ever sees the arguments. Depending on your shell,
this can fail in a couple of ways. CSH prints "No match."
because it can't match "*.bar". SH executes "mv a.foo b.foo
c.foo *.bar", which will only succeed if you happen to have a
single directory named "*.bar", which is very unlikely and almost
certainly not what you had in mind.
Depending on your shell, you can do it with a loop to "mv" each
file individually. If your system has "basename", you can use:
C Shell:
foreach f ( *.foo )
set base=`basename $f .foo`
mv $f $base.bar
end
Bourne Shell:
for f in *.foo; do
base=`basename $f .foo`
mv $f $base.bar
done
Some shells have their own variable substitution features, so
instead of using "basename", you can use simpler loops like:
C Shell:
foreach f ( *.foo )
mv $f $f:r.bar
end
Korn Shell:
for f in *.foo; do
mv $f ${f%foo}bar
done
If you don't have "basename" or want to do something like
renaming foo.* to bar.*, you can use something like "sed" to
strip apart the original file name in other ways, but the general
looping idea is the same. You can also convert file names into
"mv" commands with 'sed', and hand the commands off to "sh" for
execution. Try
ls -d *.foo | sed -e 's/.*/mv & &/' -e 's/foo$/bar/' | sh
A program by Vladimir Lanin called "mmv" that does this job
nicely was posted to comp.sources.unix (Volume 21, issues 87 and
88) in April 1990. It lets you use
mmv '*.foo' '=1.bar'
Shell loops like the above can also be used to translate file
names from upper to lower case or vice versa. You could use
something like this to rename uppercase files to lowercase:
C Shell:
foreach f ( * )
mv $f `echo $f | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
end
Bourne Shell:
for f in *; do
mv $f `echo $f | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
done
Korn Shell:
typeset -l l
for f in *; do
l="$f"
mv $f $l
done
If you wanted to be really thorough and handle files with `funny'
names (embedded blanks or whatever) you'd need to use
Bourne Shell:
for f in *; do
g=`expr "xxx$f" : 'xxx\(.*\)' | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
mv "$f" "$g"
done
The `expr' command will always print the filename, even if it
equals `-n' or if it contains a System V escape sequence like `\c'.
Some versions of "tr" require the [ and ], some don't. It
happens to be harmless to include them in this particular
example; versions of tr that don't want the [] will conveniently
think they are supposed to translate '[' to '[' and ']' to ']'.
If you have the "perl" language installed, you may find this
rename script by Larry Wall very useful. It can be used to
accomplish a wide variety of filename changes.
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# rename script examples from lwall:
# rename 's/\.orig$//' *.orig
# rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/ unless /^Make/' *
# rename '$_ .= ".bad"' *.f
# rename 'print "$_: "; s/foo/bar/ if <stdin> =~ /^y/i' *
$op = shift;
for (@ARGV) {
$was = $_;
eval $op;
die $@ if $@;
rename($was,$_) unless $was eq $_;
}
2.7) Why do I get [some strange error message] when I "rsh host command" ?
(We're talking about the remote shell program "rsh" or sometimes
"remsh" or "remote"; on some machines, there is a restricted shell
called "rsh", which is a different thing.)
If your remote account uses the C shell, the remote host will
fire up a C shell to execute 'command' for you, and that shell
will read your remote .cshrc file. Perhaps your .cshrc contains
a "stty", "biff" or some other command that isn't appropriate for
a non-interactive shell. The unexpected output or error message
from these commands can screw up your rsh in odd ways.
Here's an example. Suppose you have
stty erase ^H
biff y
in your .cshrc file. You'll get some odd messages like this.
% rsh some-machine date
stty: : Can't assign requested address
Where are you?
Tue Oct 1 09:24:45 EST 1991
You might also get similar errors when running certain "at" or
"cron" jobs that also read your .cshrc file.
Fortunately, the fix is simple. There are, quite possibly, a
whole *bunch* of operations in your ".cshrc" (e.g., "set
history=N") that are simply not worth doing except in interactive
shells. What you do is surround them in your ".cshrc" with:
if ( $?prompt ) then
operations....
endif
and, since in a non-interactive shell "prompt" won't be set, the
operations in question will only be done in interactive shells.
You may also wish to move some commands to your .login file; if
those commands only need to be done when a login session starts
up (checking for new mail, unread news and so on) it's better to
have them in the .login file.
2.8) How do I {set an environment variable, change directory} inside
a program or shell script and have that change affect my
current shell?
In general, you can't, at least not without making special
arrangements. When a child process is created, it inherits a
copy of its parent's variables (and current directory). The
child can change these values all it wants but the changes won't
affect the parent shell, since the child is changing a copy of
the original data.
Some special arrangements are possible. Your child process could
write out the changed variables, if the parent was prepared to
read the output and interpret it as commands to set its own
variables.
Also, shells can arrange to run other shell scripts in the
context of the current shell, rather than in a child process, so
that changes will affect the original shell.
For instance, if you have a C shell script named "myscript":
cd /very/long/path
setenv PATH /something:/something-else
or the equivalent Bourne or Korn shell script
cd /very/long/path
PATH=/something:/something-else export PATH
and try to run "myscript" from your shell, your shell will fork
and run the shell script in a subprocess. The subprocess is also
running the shell; when it sees the "cd" command it changes *its*
current directory, and when it sees the "setenv" command it
changes *its* environment, but neither has any effect on the
current directory of the shell at which you're typing (your login
shell, let's say).