FAQ - Shell Accounts

     man 'command'

Where 'command' is the name of the command you want more info on.
NOTE: You can also search for man pages on a certain topic. Try this:

    apropos 'subject'

Where 'subject' is a general subject.

4. How do I remove files without having it ask for verification?

To keep this message from appearing, you must type this:

    rm -f 'file'

Where 'file' is the name of the file you want deleted.
You may permanently stop this behavior if you add the following line to your .kshrc file:

    alias rm="rm"

You may also use:

    unalias rm

5. I changed my .kshrc file and nothing happened! How can I make the changes take?

Login to CyberGate again, and the changes will show up.

6. How can I make a little saying or paragraph appear after all my posts or e-mails?

You must make a file called '.signature' in your home directory. Put in this file the stuff you want to appear. Then, modify your mailer and newsreader's initialization files to read the signature. For ELM, place the following line in your 'elmrc' file, which is in '.elm' (if it doesn't exist, just create it; most editors will do this automatically):

     SIGNATURE = $HOME/.signature

     ln -s ~/.signature ~/.Sig

7. Can users have anonymous FTP directories so other people can ftp files from me?

Yes. Execute the following series of commands:

     cd /home/ftp/incoming
     mkdir $LOGNAME
     chmod 733 $LOGNAME
     cd /home/ftp/pub/users
     mkdir $LOGNAME
     chmod 755 $LOGNAME

     1. ftp to ftp.gate.net
     2. Change directory to /incoming
     3. Change directory to the same name as your username
     4. use 'put' to upload what they wish to upload

As for remote people getting things from you, that's quite a bit easier Just place the files you want to make available in /home/ftp/pub/users/ and people can ftp to ftp.gate.net and grab it. (remember to 'chmod go+r' on the file first!)

A related tip for your FTP directory: use the 'ln' command to make it easy to change the contents of your FTP area, like so:

     ln -s ~ftp/pub/users/$LOGNAME $HOME/ftp

8. I keep getting "Permission denied" or "Access denied" messages when I try to ftp things. What's wrong?

Make sure you start the ftp program in a directory you have write access to, such as your home directory.

9. I've heard of something called X Windows. How can I use it on CyberGate?

X Windows is not supported on the CyberGate computers due to its large consumption of resources. This is unlikely to change in the future.

10. What's wrong with the quota system? I can go over 10 megs.

There is nothing wrong with it. Quotas have a "hard limit" and a "soft limit". The system will let you go over the soft limit for a little while, but it will never let you go over the hard limit.

Additional space is available from CyberGate for $5 per blocks of 5 megs of additional space per month.

11. How do I see the permissions on files?

Type:

     ls -la

There are several different properties that each of your files holds. Some of these include who owns the file, and how the file can be used. If you do a "long" listing of your file (ls -la), you should see something like this:

    -rwxr--r--   1 noone     student      603 Jun 16 10:50 filename

Here, the file is called "filename.txt", is owned by the user "noone" and is in group "student". Ownership and group fields can be changed using the "chown" and "chgrp" commands, but these are usually used by support people. More importantly are the permissions on the file, which are noted by -rwxr--r--. Here the letters stand for:

	r - Read
	w - Write
	x - eXecute

There are three fields on each file and they are as follows:

        -rwxr--r--
         |_||_||_|
          |  |  |
          |  | world
          | group
        owner

So here, the file is read, write and executable for the owner and is readable by group and world (which is everyone).

12. I have a file called .tar.Z. How do I extract it?

There are a couple of ways you can do this. Here is a two-step process, assuming the original file is called "foo.tar.Z":

     tar zxvf foo.tar

     gzcat foo.tar | tar xvf -

     gunzip filename.gz

     tar xvf filename.tar

13. My PINE mail folder is getting BIG!

You need to either erase the entire file (mail/saved-messages), or manually go through with pine, select that folder (with l), and manually delete each message you want to get rid of.

14. What is the policy on files that I place in /tmp?

Files are not guaranteed to stay in the tmp directories for any length of time. If the user is concerned that the file might go away, then he/she should put the file in their home directory.

15. How can I use DOS files here without those silly ^M's appearing?

UNIX expects only newline characters to mark the end of a line, whereas DOS wants a carriage return too. To use a DOS text file on UNIX without the extra ^M's, you must strip them out of the file. Likewise, if you want to use a text file from UNIX under DOS, you must add carriage returns to the file.

The following command should do the trick for DOS to UNIX:

sed s/^V^M// < file.dos > file.unix

16. How can I find out more about IRC?

A full explanation of IRC is far beyond the scope of this document. If you wish to find out more about IRC, you probably should first read the documents in the "/pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/alt/irc" directory on rtfm.mit.edu. The FAQ's for IRC and the UnderNet are located there, and have pointers to more sources of IRC info.

17. I'm having problems with people accessing my homepage. What's wrong?

Every directory leading up to your "index.html" file must be world searchable/executable. This means you must use the 'chmod' command to make the "public_html" directory and your home directory searchable by group and everyone. The following set of commands should do it:

     chmod go+x $HOME
     chmod go+x $HOME/public_html

18. Why are USENET articles out of order or missing?

It's a USENET problem, actually. USENET (another term for newsgroups) and the software it runs on does NOT guarantee message order at all. There is no simple way to do that, given the amount of volume that goes on in USENET, and it constantly growing.

Also, not all sites are connected directly to the Internet, and network connections go down anyway, and this effects the order in which articles are propagated.

This seems to happen if a connection goes down somewhere for an extended period of time and the newer stuff arrives before the older, larger clumps of spooled articles are sent, so things are more or less current.