[Sussex] permissions & crashes?

[Thomas Adam]

On Fri, Jan 07, 2005 at 12:43:48AM +0000, John D. wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-01-06 at 23:39 +0000, Thomas Adam wrote:
> > chmod 755 $(which gnubg)
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                ^^^^^^^^^^^^

> # chmod 755 $(`which gnubg`)

Look again at what I said to type, and what you actually typed. :) What
you have done is tried to perform command-substitution twice, since:

ls `which cowsay`

and:

ls $(which cowsay)

are equivalent -- the former example using back-ticks which is used on
much older shells in Unix. The $(...) construct is much more widely
used now under bourne-like shells.

Note also that the chmod command I gave above is superfluous to your
current condition. Since you're now a member of the group "games" -- the
permissions on the gnubg binary are sufficient to allow you to run it.
It's just that why it is done that way is, well, "odd" to say the least.

> (gnubg:11685): GdkGLExt-CRITICAL **: file gdkgldrawable.c: line
> 141 (gdk_gl_drawable_gl_begin): assertion `GDK_IS_GL_DRAWABLE
> (gldrawable)' failed

Hmm. They look to be warnings only. I'm no GTK programmer. You might
want to hit google for that.

> pages and pages of it, in the terminal, as soon as I quit the
> terminal, the gnubg game quits as well

Yes -- you killed the controlling tty to which the game (gnubg) was
attached. When you do this, it's bound to die (I'll defer explaination
as to why for another day).

> Nah, it would be impractical Thomas, it's not so much of a dictionary,
> but more of a Thesaurus that I'd need i.e. look up one of the words
> and it cross references any commands that might even be vaguely
> associated, or even a command database, and a dropdown box for I want
> to ........... which would then generate a page of whatever and maybe
> a link to a manpage to show all the possible switches/arguements etc
> etc.

That's more of an encyclopedia, then? :) One app you might appreciate
(although the number of commands it supports is limited) is "tkworld".
It allows you to play around with the system commands in /{bin,sbin} -
and enumerates the command-line options graphically.

[..]

> Where I fall over, is that so often I don't even know what command I'm
> actually looking for (and it doesn't help that if, like me, you happen
> to be a little impatient). Which is the main drawback of the list here
> http://www.onlamp.com/linux/cmd/ and as you could probably see, that's
> it's just stuff extracted from an O'really book - and I find reading
> O'really as dry as buzzards arse at the height of summer! i.e. Hard
> work!

You can always perform history-expansion. If you know of the start of a
command name you used earlier, you can find it again:

[n6tadam at station Shared]$ !tk:p
tkworld

Shows that I had typed the command "tkworld" recently. By itself:

[n6tadam at station Shared]$ !tk

Would then go ahead and run the command "tkworld". The ":p" part at the
end simply causes the command to be printed, rather than executed.

-- Thomas Adam

-- 
I know nothing, and understand even less.