i recently reinstalled slack after i messed things up real good(at least i thought it was me, installing a newer glibc along with the older version in order to get firefox to install)-i went from 9.0 to 9.1 and repartitioned to get rid of a long unused NT on hda1(mbr had been screwed somehow)-tried lilo on superblock, but no go, so redid on mbr and now must pass a "root=hda1" to the boot prompt-that's the background.
tonight i'm on mozilla looking at a site which describes startup messages and how to use chkconfig to see which services are on for startup. i switch desktops and open an rxvt and su, then "chkconfig". i get;
"command not found", so i figure it's a redhat thing and i jump back to mozilla. i then think "well don't leave that root window open", so i switch back, and there, on the screen is the following:


bash-2.05b#chkconfig
bash-2.05b#: command not found
bash-2.0.5b# Richard problems etc. here. However, they still look usable albeit uglier than wished.

when i arrow up thru previous commands the "Richard" line appears as if it had been a command. any thoughts would be appreciated. thanx.

Slack doesn't use the chkconfig interface (not all linux distros do), so that is not abnormal. As far as the odd message, you weren't looking at the following page by chance were you (it's a google cache):
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache...&hl=en&start=1

I'm guessing that you had that page open and accidentally copied that line of text somehow to the root terminal (probable middle mouse button). Otherwise that's a hell of a coincidence.

thanx Capt_Caveman, i believe that you're right-your link is a page i was viewing, but i didn't think i could copy text to a terminal inadvertently or otherwise and i was somewhat surprised to see what appeared to be a conversation in progress on my machine(or via connection to my rig). i grepped the mozilla cache and found matches to the page and my post to LQ.
thanx again.