I am having quite a bit of trouble intering commands in the terminal. It keeps saying bash doesnt know what im talking about. Do I need to change it so its running somting else while I do the commands? I have no idea what to do so any help would be great.

what command(s)?

If something is not in your $PATH, and you don't give it a full path, it won't know where to find it.

Example:

[z@z ~]echo $PATH
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/home/z/bin

Anything that is /not/ in one of those directories won't run, unless you specifiy the full path:

[z@z ~]cp /bin/ls /tmp/somecommand
[z@z ~]somecommand
-bash: somecommand: command not found
[z@z ~]/tmp/somecommand
(normal 'ls' output here)

Running 'somecommand' didn't work, because it is not in my $PATH, so I had to give it the full path. Does this help?

try to locate the command

whereis "command" without quotes

if the command is something like /usr/bin/command

enter the full path of the executable in shell to invoke.

perhaps I am entering it wrong. the commands that I am trying to use are mkfs and cfdisk. I am trying to make a hard drive that is labled as free space to be usable. I enter terminal and then su to root. for cfdisk I put: cfdisk /dev/hdb
for mkfs I use: mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb is that even close to right?

mike...i dont really understand what you are suggesting

To locate cfdisk:

linux:/home/miked # whereis cfdisk
cfdisk: /sbin/cfdisk /usr/share/man/man8/cfdisk.8.gz
linux:/home/miked #

To execute cfdisk:
linux:/home/miked # /sbin/cfdisk -- this will enter a new terminal session

[2]+ Stopped /sbin/cfdisk
linux:/home/miked #

To locate mkfs:

linux:/home/miked # whereis mkfs
mkfs: /sbin/mkfs.msdos /sbin/mkfs.vfat /sbin/mkfs.xfs /sbin/mkfs.ext2 /sbin/mkfs.ext3 /sbin/mkfs.reiserfs /sbin/mkfs.jfs /sbin/mkfs.bfs /sbin/mkfs /sbin/mkfs.cramfs /sbin/mkfs.minix /usr/share/man/man8/mkfs.8.gz

--from this i know mkfs is locate in my /sbin/ directory

To execute mkfs:

linux:/home/miked # /sbin/mkfs
Usage: mkfs [-V] [-t fstype] [fs-options] device [size]
linux:/home/miked #

But for each of those commands as root i could just as easily typed

cfdisk

and

mkfs

To get the information on these commands: type man "yourcommandinquestion" without quotes

linux:/home/miked # man mkfs
Reformatting mkfs(8), please wait...

[3]+ Stopped man mkfs
linux:/home/miked # man cfdisk
Reformatting cfdisk(8), please wait...
linux:/home/miked #

Make sense now?

yea more
I am goin to go try it out. thanks a bunch

so i got it to work...mostly. I su for root, then typed whereis cfdisk. all the happened is it dropped a line and printed cfdisk: i dunno
i did the same with mkfs but it printed /sbin/mkfs.ext2 /sbin/mkfs.ext3 etc so I typed /sbin/mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb and it said it didnt have partitions did i want to continue anyway. I did and it seems to have worked. now i can mount it. the only thing is that i cant unmount it. it says its busy, even when i close everything. do you know whats going on? oh and the cfdisk: must mean i dont have that app/program right?

Try just typing cfdisk in a shell to run that...

Also, just try typing is a shell mkfs to run that...



Too force the unmount you could try as root umount -f /dev/hdb

or

fuser -k /device