And for our members, an introduction to the most frequent commands you'll use on our system. The use of [ ] indicates an example. When executing the commands, you should leave these out:

man	cd
tar	compress
gcc	ps
kill	passwd
finger	chfn
biff	chmod
mv	rm
mkdir	du

Command: 'man'
Format:

man [command name] - allows you to view the manual entry for the specific command. When at the end of a 'man' entry, typing 'q' will get you out and back to the shell.

Command List

Command: 'cd'
Format:

cd [directory] - i.e. cd /home/www/mywebdirectory
cd [..] - transports you up one directory location
cd [../..] - transports you up 2 directory locations
cd - by itself, will transport you back into your home account.

Command List

Command: 'tar'
Format:

1. tar [-flags] [.] > [tar file name]

   Example: tar -cp . > mytalkerfiles.tar.
   
   The tag -cp creates a new tar file and maintains all original permissions set on your files. '>' is the symbol to output to a specific file name, followed of course, by the filename you want.

2. tar [-flags] [tar file name]

   Example: tar -xvf mytalkerfiles.tar
   
   The '-xvf' flags tell 'tar' to extract files from an archive, to show them to you in 'v'erbose method as they unpack and to use the specified archive mytalkerfiles.tar

Command List

Command: 'compress'
Format:

compress [filename] - take any file you specify and compresses its data to make it a smaller file. The format of this new file would be filename.tar.Z

*** The reverse of this process is 'uncompress'. Example: uncompress filename.tar.Z

Command List

Command: 'gcc'
Format:

gcc [-flags] filename.c

Example: gcc -w nuts3.3.3.c

This command would complie the code nuts.3.3.3.c and the 'w' flag tells the gcc compiler to suppress warning messages.

Example: gcc -ow code_executable_name filename.c

This command does the same as above, but in addition, it outputs the compiled code to a '.out' file that you can name. By default, compiled code wil loutput to a file called a.out. We discourage this on Talker.com, because it's hard to track hundreds of a.out files. We recommend that you name your output file similar to your talker name, i.e. starwars.out or wildwest.out

Command List

Command: 'ps'
Format:

Example: ps aux

This will show you all the processes you are running and their associated PID numbers. This informaiton is useful because if a process of yours goes crazy, you cna identify it, gets its PID, and then kill that process.

Command List

Command: 'kill'
Format:

kill [PID#]

This command will effectively stop and remove an errant process under your account name. It does not remove the file, it just removed the process spawned when you executed the command to run it. This is also useful when you were in the middle of sending email through PINE, got kicked off the server, logged back in to PINE again, only to have the server tell you that PINE is locked by another process. If you run "ps" you'll probably find your stalled "bash" (login) session and the pine process you were running. You can kill these and it resets everything. If you didn't log back in right away, the server has a timeout function that will do this after 15 minutes or so.

If your process won't shut down with a normal "kill", try the command: kill -9 [PID#], and that should do the trick.

Command List

Command: 'passwd'
Format:

passwd

Executing this command from anywhere on the server while you're logged in should prompt you to set a new password for your account. Make sure you record your new password! We do not have any way of knowing what your password is. They are encrypted on the system.

Command List

Command: 'finger'
Format:

finger [user; user@somehost.com]

If you execute 'finger' by itself, it shows you your system account information. Adding the 'user' portion of it allows you to see that system account information for someone else on talker.com. Specifying the email address of a user on another system will allow you to see their information on that system if the server they are on has the finger daemon running.

Command List

Command: 'chfn'
Format:

chfn [-flags]

This command, when executed by itself, walks you through changing the information that people see when they execute a 'finger' command. This command has a bunch of options that are described in the man pages. if you use a particular flag, like -p for the phone number, it allows you to change just that option wihtout stepping through every finger field.

Command List

Command: 'biff'
Format:

biff [yes/no]

This command allows you to set whether you'd like to be notified of incoming mail while you may be in the middle of some server process, like mail or in a telnet session started from the talker.com shell. if you set it to 'no', it waits until you are finished with a process and informs you of new mail upon exiting that terminal session.

Command List

Command: 'chmod'
Format:

chmod [u/g/o] [+/-] [r/w/x] [file or directory name]

All linux system files or directories have permissions set on them for 3 different allowances; the 'user', the 'group', and 'others'. The permissions that may be set are; 'read', 'write' and 'execute', and you can either add (+) these permissions to a file, or take them away (-).

The user is the account owner. The group is a subset of 'users' on the system who are given specific permission to edit certain directories or files. "Others' are absolutely anyone else on the system.

Command List

Command: 'mv'
Format:

mv [filename/directory] [new filename/directory]

This has a couple of different uses. This command is used for renaming files as well as physically moving their location.

Example: mv speeelledwrong.txt spelledright.txt

This example moves the contents of 'speeelledwrong.txt' and moves it to another file called spelledright.txt, and removes the 'bad' file.

Example: mv /home/www/mywebdir/image.jpg /home/myacccount/image.jpg

This example shows how to move a file from one area of the server to another.

Command List

Command: 'rm'
Format:

rm [filename]

This command removes a filename that specifies you as an owner of.

Command List

Command: 'mkdir'
Format:

mkdir [directory name]

This command allows you to create a directory within your account. The command 'rmdir' performs the oppositie task, but only if the directory you are removing is empty. If you wish to remove a directory and all the files within it in one shot, the command is 'rm -Rf [directory name]'

Command List

Command: 'rm'
Format:

rm [filename]

This command removes a filename that specifies you as an owner of.

Command List

Command: 'du'
Format:

du -mc /home/[user_account] /home/www/[web_directory]

Example: du -mc /home/alisa /home/www/newsite

The example above will provide the total (-c) disk usage in these 2 locations in megabytes (-m). All accounts come with 40 megs of space for talker and web files combined, so this is an important command to know so that you can keep your directories streamlined (and thus avoid extra billing).