We have a new user, here, and he (or she) lost the command line in Red Hat LINUX. My LINUX skills are weak, at best, and I only know what Graham Glass tells me (Graham Glass and King Ables. _LINUX for Programmers and Users_. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall / Pearson), 2006). I am trying to retrace what this person's last keystrokes were, something about looking for different kinds of help pages. Any ideas where to start to get back to the root directory? Initially, we were trying to set up the first user account just after installing Red Hat LINUX on the PC. Graham cautions against using the root directory all the time. Any help appreciated.

What do you mean by "lost the command line", could you be more specific?

Do you mean root account? Root directory means /, the "base of the directory structure", i.e. a place which is the topmost. Like C:\ on Windows, if you like to think it that way. root account on the other hand means the system administrator user account, i.e. the user who has most power over the system.

If you could provide more information or a better description of what exactly has happened, it would be easier to help.

-Juho

There was a line called something like "root/dvdrecorder" and you could type things like "pwd" or "ls" and get information. That's what I'm calling the command line, the place where you typed-in LINUX commands.

This is also what I meant by "root directory". I think it's the root directory, because no accounts have been set-up, yet, not even a system administrator account.

Right now, if you look at the screen, the main menu up at the top has "Applications" and "Actions". There are 4 icons in the main display "Computer", "root's Home", "InHouseSoftware" and "FLEXTOOLS-UNIX".

Is that enough info? We were trying to type in "useradd [-d directory][-s shell] userName" and that's why he was trying to figure out what a directory was and what a shell was. I think we have a GNOME Desktop Environment.

There is a "User Manager" dialog box, that shows maybe he did create a su account (User Name-->Engineer User ID-->500 Primary Group-->su Full Name-->Engineer Login Shell-->bin/bash Home Directory-->/home/Engineer). If I could just get back to that account it would be sufficient.

This might be the solution I was looking for. Just right-clicked on the open background and got a dropdown menu. Selected "Open Terminal" and it gave me the "[root@MyCompany ~]# " command line. From here I hope Graham's book will show us how to set up user accounts.

Or, even easier "C+shift+N" works.

--Joe Kerly

soory to say this..
but u have lost ur mind...

Joe, hope you're ok from now, but it will help in future if you add your distro & version info to your details.

Thanks chrism01. That's good to know.
--Joe Kerly

to get back ur commmand line, click in "Applications" then "System Tools" then "Terminal".

if u type "man useradd" at command prompt (without the quotation), it will display the help file (manual) for the useradd command and its options

The disto / version seems to be

Red Hat (3.4.6-2)

LINUX 2.6.9-42

Do these make any sense?

--Joe Kerly