LINUX NEWS
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Thursday, July 26, 2001
Read By Over 6,000 Linux Enthusiasts Weekly!TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) Sean’s Notes
2) Linux News
Adobe Backs Off
Kernel 2.4.7 Released
Mandrake to Have an IPO
Big Hole in SSH 3.03) Linux Resources
Bootstrapping Linux: An Analysis
Move Over, Procmail
PHP Tutorial
Shell Scripting Tutorial
High Availability Filesystem4) App o’ the week
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1) Sean’s Notes
“RTFM” is the classic answer to the newbie question, usually a sign from the giver of the answer that the solution is described in detail in the system documentation.
You may have noticed when you downloaded Linux that you didn’t get a manual. If you bought it, the printed documentation doesn’t seem large enough to answer all your questions. So how are you supposed to RTFM if you don’t have one?
Luckily, the documentation can be found on your computer in the form of “man pages”. The man system is divided into sections; each section takes care of a different part of the documentation:
1 - Commands 2 - System Calls 3 - Library Calls 4 - Special Files ( usually /dev) 5 - Config File Formats 6 - Games 7 - Macro Packages and Conventions 8 - System Management Commands
Keep in mind that the lines are blurred between the sections, and that there can be even more sections depending on what you have installed.
Why the sections? One example would be that man(1) teaches you how to use man, while man(7) teaches you how to write man pages. (Note the use of parenthesis… this is commonly used when one wants to be explicit)
Luckily, the man program will search the sections in order. This is all controlled out of the /etc/man.config file.
Now’s a good time to give you an example of how to use man. Learn about the man.config file with:
$ man man.config
Man pages by themselves are nothing special… Most have a brief synopsis of the command, lengthy descriptions of the options, and perhaps an example or two. After that comes a very important section – SEE ALSO. Most programs will list their config files in here. As an example, ask for help on man itself:
$ man man … SEE ALSO apropos(1), whatis(1), less(1), groff(1), man.config(5).
It’s telling you that there are other commands (as specified by the (1)), and a config file (man.config(5)).
Earlier, though, I said there were two man pages for man… One in section 1 and the other in 7. When you typed “man man”, you got 1, so how do you get 7?
$ man 7 man
(users of really old Linux versions, and BSD users take note – for this one you’d run man -s 7 man)
That’s all well and good if you know what you’re looking for, but what if you’re lost? Let’s say you want to add a user. “apropos” will search the index of man pages for the substring you pass it.
$ apropos user …
Ouch… My machine returned 185 entries. It just so happens that the command I’m looking for was at the end, but what if it wasn’t? The answer to that has nothing to do with man pages, but with the (IMHO) handiest tool in the System Administrator’s arsenal, grep.
$ apropos user | grep -i create mysqlaccess [mysqlaccess] (1) - Create new users to mysql newusers (8) - update and create new users in batch useradd (8) - Create a new user or update default new user information
To those just tuning into the world of Linux, I piped the output of apropos with the ’|’ character, into the grep command, which prints out the lines that match the given substring. I used “-i”, which means to ignore case.
From this list of three commands, I can see that useradd is
what I want (though newusers looks like one I should tuck in my pocket for another day). Pull up the new found man page with:
$ man useradd
Some environment variables control the way man operates (it can also be done in /etc/man.config). Setting PAGER will change your viewer–by default it’s probably less, but depending on your terminal you may want to make it use more. Likewise, MANPATH can let you add extra search directories to the man command. If you installed some software to your home directory that makes a man directory, you could have man search it:
$ export MANPATH=~/man or $ setenv MANPATH ~/man
So, that’s the man page system. Next time you have a problem, give these techniques a try–maybe you’ll save yourself some time!
Long live the Penguin,
Sean mailto:swalberg@brainbuzz.com
Visit the Linux News Board at http://boards.brainbuzz.com/boards/vbt.asp?b2
2) Linux News
Adobe Backs Off
“San Jose, Calif. - Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today jointly recommend the release of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov from federal custody. Adobe is also withdrawing its support for the criminal complaint against Dmitry Sklyarov.”
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/US_v_Sklyarov/20010723_eff_adobe_sklyaro v_pr.html
Kernel 2.4.7 Released
Nothing out of the ordinary in this release of the Linux kernel, just looks like a lot of cleanups. We should expect to see the pace of upgrades slowing down now as the kernel code stabilizes.
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/ChangeLog-2.4.7
Mandrake to Have an IPO
Mandrake, makers of a fine Linux distribution, has announced their plans for an initial public offering of company stock. The market they are entering is the French “Marche Libre” (Free Market), with an initial price of 6.2 Euros (under $5.50 USD). Congrats, and best of luck!
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/company/investors/ipo
Big Hole in SSH 3.0
SSH, the Secure Shell, is supposed to protect your system from hackers. However, if the software itself is buggy, that doesn’t help out! Luckily, it’s in the 3.0.0 version, which is recent enough that most people won’t have upgraded.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6649868.html?tag=lh
3) Linux Resources
Bootstrapping Linux: An Analysis
If you’re curious as to what happens with the system after the kernel comes up, you can read through the startup scripts. But how does the system get to that state? This article walks you through the process, from BIOS to kernel.
http://www.linux.com/learn/newsitem.phtml?sid=1&aid476
Move Over, Procmail
Procmail’s syntax leaves something to be desired. For those that prefer a programming-like view of mail filtering, Mail ::Audit may be for you. It provides a high level library that lets you filter incoming mail using perl syntax. Even those that don’t know perl should be able to use this tutorial to filter mail, as it provides very good examples.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/07/17/mailfiltering.html
PHP Tutorial
PHP, the ultra-cool server side web scripting language, still requires that you learn some new concepts to get going. This tutorial is a good kickstart into the world of PHP programming, with the intention of giving you enough knowledge to start making use of the reference material (ie, the docs) available elsewhere on the site.
http://php.net/tut.php
Shell Scripting Tutorial
When the document starts off with a quote “When the only hammer you have is C++, the whole world looks like a thumb.”, you know you’re in for a treat. If you’ve read some of the other tutorials on the net, you may want to learn about some more techniques, like functions, that the shell can do for you. This tutorial picks up where the others leave off… If this is your first foray into scripting, you’ll find links at the bottom of the article that cover the basics.
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue57/okopnik.html
High Availability Filesystem
For those systems that just can’t go down, but need shared disks, InterMezzo might be for you. Filesystems can be replicated across a network, but all the expected locking is there. As usual, it’s Beta, but there seems to be a strong development team behind it.
http://www.inter-mezzo.org/
4) App o’ the week
I’m a big fan of RPM, but it does have some shortcomings. rpm-get is a simple clone of Debian’s apt-get, which does a good job of resolving dependencies and making upgrades easier.
http://www.linuxscript.org/rpm-get/
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