Using Terminal and vi

tolunay · Nov 15, 2009

If anyone could assist I would greatly appreciate it...

I am taking a class at community college, "UNIX using Linux" and using Terminal in order to run my scripts. I created a .html file in vi and was instructed to open the file in a web browser to see the web page. However, I cannot find the file I created in order to open it in a web browser.

Where should I be looking for the file?

Thanks

Dysfunction · Nov 15, 2009

where did you save it? If you didn't change directories it's very likely in your home directory which would be /Users/<username>

But, I can't believe they've got you doing vi without introducing you to the pwd command. Open terminal, do a ls, and if you see the file, do pwd. If not... do..

find / -name <filename>

tolunay · Nov 15, 2009

Well...they did teach pwd in the beginning of the book, but apparently I'm not retaining all the commands and how all this goes together...lol.

Anywho...I connected to the school's server and did ls and I can see the file in the home directory, but I guess I'm still confused as to how to open it in a web browser...sorry...

Thank you for the quick response

Dysfunction · Nov 15, 2009

OhhhHH is this on your schools account? If so is there a public_html directory in your home directory? If there is, mv the file to that, chmod 755 the file and you should be able to access it.. typically via something like

http://your.schools.domain/~yourusername

Since you can use vi on your mac.. I was confused as to where you were talking about

tolunay · Nov 15, 2009

You ROCK!!!! Thank you sooooo much!!!

leopard-user1 · Nov 15, 2009

And by the way what exactly does the "ls" command do?

cwa107 · Nov 15, 2009

leopard-user1 said:
And by the way what exactly does the "ls" command do?

It shows the directory contents. Similar to the 'dir' command in DOS.

Anytime you want to find out what a UNIX command does, type 'man <command>'. In this case, you'd type:

Code:

man ls

And you'd get:

Code:

LS(1)                     BSD General Commands Manual                    LS(1)

NAME
     ls -- list directory contents

SYNOPSIS
     ls [-ABCFGHLOPRSTUW@abcdefghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file ...]

DESCRIPTION
     For each operand that names a file of a type other than directory, ls
     displays its name as well as any requested, associated information.  For
     each operand that names a file of type directory, ls displays the names
     of files contained within that directory, as well as any requested, asso-
     ciated information.

     If no operands are given, the contents of the current directory are dis-
     played.  If more than one operand is given, non-directory operands are
     displayed first; directory and non-directory operands are sorted sepa-
     rately and in lexicographical order.

     The following options are available:

...and if you hit the space bar, it will go on to list all of the arguments.

Dysfunction · Nov 15, 2009

or the arrow keys, since man uses 'less' to display the file contents