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-   -   general questions re shell, prompts, X (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/general-questions-re-shell-prompts-x-466828/)

carlos88 07-23-2006 01:04 PM

general questions re shell, prompts, X
 
Chaps, very new newbie ...very thick, wondering about three things in my Slack (installed with relative ease - apart from Lilo, but did it) -

Shell - my default shell is bash. But I was wondering, if you didnt have a shell set up as default, what could you do? Basically, how can you tell if a command you enter is a bash command, a standard linux command, or a slackware command? Or am I getting the wrong end of the stick here?

Prompts - when I first log in, my prompt is a tilda and hash. If I do Cd /, then the tilda becomes a /. So whats the tilda all about?

X - I'm using blackbox as default for the time being, and in xterm, I cd to the games. Interestingly, all the games are in bright light green - I can hardly read it. Also, the path on my prompt ends with games# , even though directory is games.

I did do google searches for this info, but apart from unanswered limited stuff to 'linux without shell', couldnt get anywhere.
Thanks

Tinkster 07-23-2006 01:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by carlos88
Chaps, very new newbie ...very thick, wondering about three things in my Slack (installed with relative ease - apart from Lilo, but did it) -

Shell - my default shell is bash. But I was wondering, if you didnt have a shell set up as default, what could you do? Basically, how can you tell if a command you enter is a bash command, a standard linux command, or a slackware command? Or am I getting the wrong end of the stick here?

To determine whether a command is a bash-builtin or a
stand-alone executable look at "man bash".
man bash
/^SHELL BUILTIN


Quote:

Originally Posted by carlos88
Prompts - when I first log in, my prompt is a tilda and hash. If I do Cd /, then the tilda becomes a /. So whats the tilda all about?

The tilde indicates that you're in your home directory, it's
short for (every users) /home/username


Quote:

Originally Posted by carlos88
X - I'm using blackbox as default for the time being, and in xterm, I cd to the games. Interestingly, all the games are in bright light green - I can hardly read it. Also, the path on my prompt ends with games# , even though directory is games.

I did do google searches for this info, but apart from unanswered limited stuff to 'linux without shell', couldnt get anywhere.
Thanks

As for the colours: alias ls to ls --color-never and they're gone.

The # indicates that you're doing something very stupid, you're
running as root, which is the single biggest mistake new-comers
to the Linux-world make.



Cheers,
Tink


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