newbie learning experience Joe Warner initially posted a message to a couple of FreeBSD mailing lists (Newbies and Advocacy). Within hours, he received a few responses of support and encouragement for his work. They also suggested that he submit the story to DaemonNews and The FreeBSD Diary. Unfortunately, DaemonNews just published their monthly edition a …
changing your default editor When I was upgrading to 3.1, I was told about mergemaster, which helps you reconcile/merge your old /etc with the new /etc. However, with my upgrade came the vi editor, and not the ee which I knew and loved. Here’s how I changed it so that mergemaster used ee. This setting …
how to untar/tar NOTE: See also this Backing up Files with Tar by Dru Lavigne. It covers much more detail than this article does. tar is used to create a Tape ARchive. The resulting file is known as a tarball. It’s pretty much the same concept as a ZIP file, if you know what they …
sending a HUP to a program (kill) From time to time, you need to tell a program to HUP (Hang UP). This causes the program to restart and examine its configuration files. This is especially useful if you have changed the configuration settings. There are two commands you can use for this: kill and killall. …
Stuff for newbies If you are new to UNIX or FreeBSD, please consult the following resources. They really will make your life easier. Things everyone should read – a list of must-read FreeBSD documents. man hier Resources for newbies from the FreeBSD website – read everything here UNIXHelp server lists Introduction to UNIX Newbie Install …