Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 13:35:11 -0700 (PDT) From: "K. Marsh" <durang@u.washington.edu> To: Harmen Quast <hquast@hotmail.com> Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: help Message-ID: <Pine.A41.4.10.9904141313150.41540-100000@goodall2.u.washington.edu> In-Reply-To: <19990414110305.32833.qmail@hotmail.com>
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On Wed, 14 Apr 1999, Harmen Quast wrote: > I hop someone on this mailing lest can help me. > How do you copy, delete, acces the A drive and isn't there a Norton > Commander alike program that I can use (how do I get and install it?) Hi Harmen. I just wanted to point out, in case you didn't already know, that the basic commands for FreeBSD are the same as those for UNIX. If you get a basic UNIX book such as O'Reilly & Associates "Learning the UNIX Operating System" or a monster book like Sams Publishing "UNIX Unleashed" then most of what the book contains applies directly to FreeBSD. Also, you will be needing basic command-line skills to be effective in FreeBSD, so try not to jump straight to a Norton Commander-type utility. There are online man pages, which I hope you installed, to help you with basic commands. Copying is done with "cp", so to get the manual page you enter at the prompt: man cp And you will get a few pages describing how the copy command is used. Delete is done with "rm", and a floppy is used by first "mount"ing it with the mount command, and then treating it as though it were a directory on the hard disk. Do "man mount" to get more on that. One more thing, be careful what you do. If you are in your root directory and you type in "rm -r *" you will DELETE EVERYTHING. FreeBSD will not pause and say, "are you sure you want to erase your whole world?" It will just do what you told it to. Be careful what commands you issue, and be extra careful with wildcard characters like "*". One other thing that you should get used to is NOT rebooting. You can change just about anything in FreeBSD without rebooting. Reboot only when you have built a new kernel and you want to try it out. It might seem like a step backward at first, as if you're learning DOS again. But stick with it and you'll find you have a very versatile tool at your finger tips, and when you're good, you can automate it with buttons and fancy scripts to do anything you want. FreeBSD is several orders of magnitude more powerful, stable, and useful than DOS, or any Microsoft product for that matter. (except Excel, that's one MS program that is unequaled. Statistically, company that big can't possibly do *everything* wrong.) Good luck. Kenneth J. Marsh University of Washington durang@u.washington.edu Chemical Engineering To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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