Exiting a shell
 

Have installed slackware multilib and it says that after I compile something I should exit a shell.
In a way I'm lost because I don't grasp the full meaning of shell, but I did some googling and it basically says it is that command prompt looking thingy.

I'm logged in as user, running KDE, have Konsole up and running TS3 on it. I opened another tab in Konsole, went "su", then compiled what I need to compile.

Now... what is understood as exiting a shell?
1. Simply using "exit" which returns me to user and then if I go "su" again everything would be... "fine"?
2. Simply using "exit" which returns me to user in Konsole, then using "exit" again to exit that tab, then remaking a tab and everything is "fine"?
3. Exiting both tabs in Konsole, "crashing" TS3 in process and rerunning Konsole?
4. Exiting both tabs in Konsole, exiting KDE, rerunning KDE
5. Exiting both tabs in Konsole, exiting KDE, using "exit" one more time to log out of the user and then relog?

Exit as root, exit as user, then you'll be back to a 64-bit compiling environment.

Guess that means option number 2 which involves closing that one tab and leaving Konsole still running with one user logged in (where I'm running TS)?

Mmm, not sure how that would affect compiling anything. Whether you would still be in 32 or 64-bit mode. Whether you would have to exit Konsole altogether or not.

:P me ether, that's why I'm asking. But they did said that I'm supposed to exit the shell so guess there is a reason behind that one too :)

a shell in short is the program that provides the interface for the operating system, even gnome/kde are shells,

technically you shouldnt compile as root rather switch to root once you are done compiling to run make install

probably a good idea, but then again closing the terminal window will do the same as typing exit at the prompt, if the environment variables are local to that window otherwise logging out of might be necessary to return you to a full 64bit environment (though simply setting the variables back to default would work too its easier just to type exit then it is to set variables)

Yeah, I should have mentioned that.

Unfortunately technically I'm not sure what I'm doing except running slackBuild script. Was doing them in user mode but read somewhere that I'm supposed to run them as root so I switched to that :) Thanks for info.

Oh yeah, run SlackBuilds as root. That multilib readme concerns compiling from source, not SlackBuilds.