[NTLUG:Discuss] Really Basic

[Kenneth Loafman]

Allen Meyers wrote:
> I grew tired of asking questions so I decided on an online organized linux course. Who am I kidding I have more questions now then I did before.
> We are on the linux shell and they are giving comman line codes to put into the terminal to familiarize ones self with command line.
> Example cd / nothing happens

What distro are you running?  Your prompt should change if you actually
change directories.  It will on Redhat and Debian based distros, at
least the new ones will.

> So got innovative sudo cd / and asked for password hey felt like I was getting somewhere no such command
> So what is it about terminal and command line I do not know. The enter key is the trigger is it not.
> Please advise and thanks

OK, here you'll need a bit of explanation to see what happened.  sudo
expects to see an executable command as the option.  What you gave it
was a shell command, which is not executable in itself.  To sudo a cd
shell command, you would need to do:

  sudo /bin/sh -c cd /

but this will not accomplish what you want, which is to change the
working directory of your current shell to '/'.  This command will just
return, having cd'ed its instance of the shell to '/', and will not
affect the current shell.

To explore this further, execute the following.

  cd ~
  pwd

and you should see '/home/meyers', or whatever your login name is.

If you execute the command:

  ls

you should see a listing of the home directory.  Now back to the sudo
command above.  To prove that it has gone to '/', execute this:

  sudo /bin/sh -c 'cd / ; ls'

This tells sudo to execute /bin/sh as root with the command 'cd / ; ls',
which is a compound command of 'cd /' followed by 'ls'.  The listing you
see should be of the '/' directory.

Hope this helps.

...Ken