Re: Scripting Additions: Embracing the Horror of Unix
Re: Scripting Additions: Embracing the Horror of Unix
- Subject: Re: Scripting Additions: Embracing the Horror of Unix
- From: John W Baxter <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 23:52:42 -0800
At 16:58 -0500 1/30/2002, J.B. Stewart wrote:
>
The hardest
>
part of all this (for me) seems to be knowing the Unix command exists in
>
the first place.
Of course the Unix command exists*. Finding out what it is is the
difficult part.
The apropos command is your friend:
For a simple example try
apropos restart
(which, oddly, leaves out shutdown (eg shutdown -r now), which on Unix
systems where it makes a difference is the better way to go...increasingly
over time, it makes no difference).
To be overwhelmed with possibilities, try
apropos open
(Most result lists are between those extremes.)
apropos won't work if you haven't arranged for the weekly cron task to
actually run.
--John
*Unix benefitted from a generation+ of college (and later high school)
students needing for-credit projects, or just having fun. The crackers
benefitted from the same thing...that's where many of the security problems
came from (buffer overflows, trusting outside text input without checking,
etc etc).
Professionals don't make those errors...that's why Microsoft's software has
so few security problems. OOPS...something went wrong on the way to the
prior sentence!
--
John Baxter email@hidden Port Ludlow, WA, USA