I was looking in the /etc directory, using ls –l and saw a file “zprofile -> profile” ( permissions are lrwxrwxrwx). Curious about contents of a link file, I did cat zprofile -> profile and saw something like “input is output”.

Normally, “q” gets one out of cat.



Here, it did not, so without even a prompt, I tried typing quit, exit, bye, disconnect, logout, but nothing seemed to get me out of this situation. Stuck, I did the un-thinkable and powered down. L



At power-up, it goes thru the hda1 (note FIXED-zero d-time) & continues with hda3, hda4, disc checks ok & puts up the usual login prompt.



I type in jem2 <enter>



Password: xxxxx <enter>



And it gives me:



bash : q : command not found

bash : q : command not found (twice as shown), then reverts back to original login prompt.



If I do same as above, except, leave passed blank and press <enter>, then the response is different from above in that the “bash : q : command not found” does NOT show up, rather “Login incorrect” & reverts to original login prompt.



Doing the insane and repeating these login attempts (and expecting different results), of course only proves the insanity.



What now?

Hi.

cat'ing from a file to a file linked to it will wipe the file. Somehow (and I'm not sure how) you've managed to get your 'q's, from trying to exit from the cat, into /etc/profile. Bash tries to run anything in this file when it starts, hence the 'bash : q : command not found'.

Dave

P.S. Ctrl-C gets you out of a cat process, not q.

Thank you very much!

I looked in profile using BOOT/ROOT floppies and found that it is terribly corrupted. It has all the trash in there that I typed in trying to get out of cat & nothing else. Things such as q, exit, logout, disconnect, etc.

Since I didn't set up this machine, I have no idea what was there nor how to re-generate whatever needs to be in profiles. How would a novice proceed from here?

JesseMor

What distro is it?

What you did is to
cat the content of zprofile AND stdin into profile ...
In other words, after having put all of itself back into
itself you filled it up with whatever you typed trying to
stop the process ... a Ctrl-C should have fixed it.

That said: you're not "getting out of cat" at all, what you
get out of with a q is less.

What you wnated to do was a plain
less /etc/zprofile


Cheers,
Tink

Book that was with computer shows 3.5
In /etc/issue, shows 2.0.35
In /etc/slackware-version, shows 7.0.0
In /etc/motd, shows 2.2.16
At bootup, just before login, shows "Welcome to Linux 2.0.35
After ROOT login, shows 2.2.16
At LILO, just after Linux (extfs partition, it shows
Linuv 2.2.16 (root@Titan2)
gcc version egcs- 2.91.66 19998314/Linux egcs 1.1.2 release #1
Friday aug 18, 2000

So, in short, I don't know what distro.

JesseMor