[NTLUG:Discuss] (no subject)
Steve Baker
sjbaker1 at airmail.net
Sun Sep 26 16:54:10 CDT 1999
Greaghoir wrote:
>
> Oidche mhath...
>
> Brian writes:
> >I just finished installing the 3.3.5 XF86 stuff last night, running SuSE
> >6.0. No problems...have you aliased 'sh' by chance?
>
> Please forgive the newbie here ... what is "aliased the 'sh'" mean? How do I
> know if I it is? How do I fix it if it is?
This is *really* unlikely to be your problem unless you've been doing
some serious hacking to your setup.
Anyway for your education :-) ....
There is a command in UNIX that lets you save typing by mapping one
command into another.
Suppose you type "cd /usr/local/netscape" a LOT of times every day.
Instead, you could type this:
alias cn "cd /usr/local/netscape"
...and from then on, typing 'cn' would have the exact same thing
as "cd /usr/local/netscape".
OK, but this has some risks. Suppose 'cn' was a system command
of some importance (like "sh") and suppose you'd done this in your
'.cshrc' or '.bashrc' file - so that the command would "take over"
the function of the "sh" command. The result would be pretty nasty!
How do you know? Well, there are two ways:
alias
...this lists out all the current aliases...or you could
type:
which sh
...which will tell you which file implements the command "sh". If
that's the "normal" sh command, it'll say:
/bin/sh
...if you somehow aliased it then it'll say:
sh: aliased to <some command>
However, I'll bet any money that you didn't do something like that
by accident.
--
Steve Baker http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1 at airmail.net (home) http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker at hti.com (work)
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