Very Computer

Archive-name: unix-faq/faq/part1
Version: $Id: part1,v 2.9 1996/06/11 13:07:56 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.

This collection of documents is Copyright (c) 1994, Ted Timar, except
Part 6, which is Copyright (c) 1994, Pierre Lewis and Ted Timar.
All rights reserved.  Permission to distribute the collection is
hereby granted providing that distribution is electronic, no money
is involved, reasonable attempts are made to use the latest version
and all credits and this copyright notice are maintained.
Other requests for distribution will be considered.  All reasonable
requests will be granted.

All information here has been contributed with good intentions, but
none of it is guaranteed either by the contributors or myself to be
accurate.  The users of this information take all responsibility for
any damage that may occur.

Many FAQs, including this one, are available on the archive site
rtfm.mit.edu in the directory pub/usenet/news.answers.
The name under which a FAQ is archived appears in the "Archive-Name:"
line at the top of the article.  This FAQ is archived as
"unix-faq/faq/part[1-7]".

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:

      1.1)  Who helped you put this list together?
      1.2)  When someone refers to 'rn(1)' or 'ctime(3)', what does
              the number in parentheses mean?
      1.3)  What does {some strange unix command name} stand for?
      1.4)  How does the gateway between "comp.unix.questions" and the
              "info-unix" mailing list work?
      1.5)  What are some useful Unix or C books?
      1.6)  What happened to the pronunciation list that used to be
              part of this document?

If you're looking for the answer to, say, question 1.5, and want to skip
everything else, you can search ahead for the regular expression "^1.5)".

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
tmati...@isgtec.com.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Who helped you put this list together?
Date: Thu Mar 18 17:16:55 EST 1993

1.1)  Who helped you put this list together?

      This document was one of the first collections of Frequently Asked
      Questions.  It was originally compiled in July 1989.

      I took over the maintenance of this list.  Almost all of the work
      (and the credit) for generating this compilation was done by
      Steve Hayman.

      We also owe a great deal of thanks to dozens of Usenet readers who
      submitted questions, answers, corrections and suggestions for this
      list.  Special thanks go to Maarten Litmaath, Guy Harris and
      Jonathan Kamens, who have all made many especially valuable
      contributions.

      Part 5 of this document (shells) was written almost entirely by
      Matthew Wicks <wi...@dcdmjw.fnal.gov>.

      Part 6 of this document (Unix flavours) was written almost entirely by
      Pierre (P.) Lewis <l...@bnr.ca>.

      Where possible the author of each question and the date it was last
      updated is given at the top.  Unfortunately, I only started this
      practice recently, and much of the information is lost.  I was also
      negligent in keeping track of who provided updates to questions.
      Sorry to those who have made valuable contributions, but did not
      receive the credit and recognition that they legitimately deserve.

      I make this document available in *roff format (ms and mm macro
      packages).  Andrew Cromarty has also converted it into Texinfo format.
      Marty Leisner <leis...@sdsp.mc.xerox.com> cleaned up the Texinfo
          version.

      Major contributors to this document who may or may not be
      recognized elsewhere are:

        Steve Hayman <shay...@Objectario.com>
        Pierre Lewis <l...@bnr.ca>
        Jonathan Kamens <j...@mit.edu>
        Tom Christiansen <tchr...@mox.perl.com>
        Maarten Litmaath <ma...@nat.vu.nl>
        Guy Harris <g...@auspex.com>

      The formatted versions are available for anonymous ftp from
      ftp.wg.omron.co.jp under pub/unix-faq/docs .

------------------------------

Subject: When someone refers to 'rn(1)' ...  the number in parentheses mean?
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 1994 16:37:26 -0500

1.2)  When someone refers to 'rn(1)' or 'ctime(3)', what does
      the number in parentheses mean?

      It looks like some sort of function call, but it isn't.  These
      numbers refer to the section of the "Unix manual" where the
      appropriate documentation can be found.  You could type
      "man 3 ctime" to look up the manual page for "ctime" in section 3
      of the manual.

      The traditional manual sections are:

        1       User-level  commands
        2       System calls
        3       Library functions
        4       Devices and device drivers
        5       File formats
        6       Games
        7       Various miscellaneous stuff - macro packages etc.
        8       System maintenance and operation commands

      Some Unix versions use non-numeric section names.  For instance,
      Xenix uses "C" for commands and "S" for functions.  Some newer
      versions of Unix require "man -s# title" instead of "man # title".

      Each section has an introduction, which you can read with "man #
      intro" where # is the section number.

      Sometimes the number is necessary to differentiate between a
      command and a library routine or system call of the same name.
      For instance, your system may have "time(1)", a manual page about
      the 'time' command for timing programs, and also "time(3)", a
      manual page about the 'time' subroutine for determining the
      current time.  You can use "man 1 time" or "man 3 time" to
      specify which "time" man page you're interested in.

      You'll often find other sections for local programs or even
      subsections of the sections above - Ultrix has sections 3m, 3n,
      3x and 3yp among others.

------------------------------

Subject: What does {some strange unix command name} stand for?
Date: Thu Mar 18 17:16:55 EST 1993

1.3)  What does {some strange unix command name} stand for?

      awk = "Aho Weinberger and Kernighan"

        This language was named by its authors, Al Aho, Peter
        Weinberger and Brian Kernighan.

      grep = "Global Regular Expression Print"

        grep comes from the ed command to print all lines matching a
        certain pattern

                    g/re/p

        where "re" is a "regular expression".

      fgrep = "Fixed GREP".

        fgrep searches for fixed strings only.  The "f" does not stand
        for "fast" - in fact, "fgrep foobar *.c" is usually slower than
        "egrep foobar *.c"  (Yes, this is kind of surprising. Try it.)

        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 Supervisor"

        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
...

read more »

Archive-name: unix-faq/faq/part2
Version: $Id: part2,v 2.9 1996/06/11 13:07:56 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.

This collection of documents is Copyright (c) 1994, Ted Timar, except
Part 6, which is Copyright (c) 1994, Pierre Lewis and Ted Timar.
All rights reserved.  Permission to distribute the collection is
hereby granted providing that distribution is electronic, no money
is involved, reasonable attempts are made to use the latest version
and all credits and this copyright notice are maintained.
Other requests for distribution will be considered.  All reasonable
requests will be granted.

All information here has been contributed with good intentions, but
none of it is guaranteed either by the contributors or myself to be
accurate.  The users of this information take all responsibility for
any damage that may occur.

Many FAQs, including this one, are available on the archive site
rtfm.mit.edu in the directory pub/usenet/news.answers.
The name under which a FAQ is archived appears in the "Archive-Name:"
line at the top of the article.  This FAQ is archived as
"unix-faq/faq/part[1-7]".

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 ?
      2.14) How do I ring the terminal bell during a shell script?
      2.15) Why can't I use "talk" to talk with my friend on machine X?
      2.16) Why does calendar produce the wrong output?

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
tmati...@isgtec.com.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: How do I remove a file whose name begins with a "-" ?
Date: Thu Mar 18 17:16:55 EST 1993

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".

------------------------------

Subject: How do I remove a file with funny characters in the filename ?
Date: Thu Mar 18 17:16:55 EST 1993

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"
...

read more »