Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 21:58:06 -0600 From: Sean Kelly <kelly@fsl.noaa.gov> To: durang@u.washington.edu Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Are there any Freebsd books? Message-ID: <199607170357.DAA00898@gatekeeper.fsl.noaa.gov> In-Reply-To: <Pine.A32.3.92a.960716185933.22821C-100000@homer26.u.washington.edu> (message from Ken Marsh on Tue, 16 Jul 1996 19:09:10 -0700 (PDT))
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>>>>> "Ken" == Ken Marsh <durang@u.washington.edu> writes:
Ken> I am aware of the Freebsd Documentation project, and although
Ken> it has been quite helpful,
Yay!!! :-)
Ken> it is not nearly complete.
Waaaa!!! :-(
Ken> Is there any book that covers elements of BSD such as what rc
Ken> files are, how tar knows where to put the extracted files,
Ken> and what exactly MAKEDEV does, and what devices can it make?
I'm not sure if such a text even exists. I'm not sure what books to
recommend as substitutes either. Maybe _The Unix Programming
Environment_ by Kernigan and Pike (although it's a bit dated), and
_Unix System Administration_ by Nemeth et al (quite good). _Unix
Power Tools_ by Peek, O'Reilly, and Loukides also also a lot of
information on tar and what not.
I learned most of this stuff through experience and by reading the man
pages. And by asking around. After eight years hanging around Unix,
these things just become second nature. Just ask!
rc files: if you mean /etc/rc and it brethren, these are just shell
scripts that are executed by a Bourne shell for system
initialization. The _Unix Programming Environment_ has a lot on
Bourne shell programming, also see sh(1). If you mean .cshrc,
.mailrc, then just see their appropriate man pages: csh(1), mail(1),
etc.
How tar knows where to put extracted files: tar extracts files
relative to the current directory. If the tar archive contains a,
a/b, a/c, a/d/e, f, and g, then tar will make
a
a/b
a/c
a/d/e
f
g
right in the current directory. Tar archives can also contain full
pathnames, like /a/b/c, so no matter what directory you're in it'll
always extact /a/b/c.
tar also supports the -C option, which specifies what the current
directory should be for extractions. So, tar -C <dir> is sort of
like:
cd <dir>
tar
What MAKEDEV does: it's basically a wrapper around mknod. What mknod
does: it makes special entries in the filesystem that represent entry
points into the kernel's device drivers. Each node made with mknod
has a major number, which represents the device driver. For example,
number 4 is the SCSI disk driver, 28 is the terminal driver. There's
also a minor number, which usually represents which device is handled
by the driver. For example, 0 is the first SCSI disk, 8 is the second
SCSI disk. 1..7 are other partitions in the first SCSI disk.
Ken> I have so many questions that I am left to hypothesize
Ken> about. Far too many to send to questions@Freebsd.org.
Just ask 'em.
--
Sean Kelly
NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory kelly@fsl.noaa.gov
Boulder Colorado USA http://www-sdd.fsl.noaa.gov/~kelly/
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