[NTLUG:Discuss] (no subject)

[Steve Baker]

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)