There are three Unix commands that are often useful when you are
sending in questions. The command history prints out a
list of the last few hundred commands you have run. You can type
history>temp.txt to put these commands in a file, then
cut and paste from that file to send me (or the newsgroup) the exact
commands that you wrote.
The second useful command is set, with no argument.
This prints out all of your environment variables, and their current
values. Again, cut and paste from this to show me what your
CVSROOT, CVS_RSH, and other environment
variables are.
Finally, there is a command called script (with no
arguments). When you run this command, you immediately get back your
usual command-line prompt (in my case, a dollar sign). However, Unix
is then recording everything you type, and everything that is printed
to your screen, in a file called typescript. This file
is created in the directory you were in when you ran
script. When you are done recording, type ctrl-D (that's
the control key and the "D" key at the same time). Ctrl-D means "end
of input" in Unix; in this case, it tells the script
command to stop recording things. If you take a look in the file
typescript, you will then see every typing mistake,
newline character, and so forth. You can cut and paste from this file
to show people exactly what you did.
Warning: please make sure you don't accidentally include sensitive information (like your student number) when posting information that you collect this way.
$Id: gathering-info.html,v 1.1 2007/01/02 01:57:49 reid Exp $