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Joe_public's All Noob Question Thread


Joe_public

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I am trying real hard to learn Linux (Back Track 5) I am brand new at this and just learned yesterday what a shell is and used for. I have searched tons of web sites and googled almost every question I have had. I learned that it is not godd to log in as root So I changed the root passwd and created a non-root user account.

Since I will need a lot of help and have tons of questions I don't want to make a new thread for every new noob question so I am making my own thread where I will ask my questions.

I will

  • Search on my own for answers first by reading books and using Google
  • Try to limit my questions to no more than two a day
  • try to ask intelligent questions

I ask of you who chose to reply to my questions remember Linux was new to all of you at one time. My question may seem real simple to you but to a guy who has never used Linux it is like trying to navigate in a strange land and you don't even speak the language. When I post a question and have either found the answer on my own or it was answered by a member I will let it be known and post a new question whenever I have one.

If you have any sites, books or another study tips and/or aids please post them.

Question 1. How long does a grep command take? I am following alone with a Linux book and was told to try grep, but it has been over 5 minutes now. Also how do I stop a command that is stuck or taking to long to process?

How I currently have to stop bad commands is by stopping the VM player. I am guessing there is a way to force stop commands and processes like ctrl+Alt+Delete in windows. Can anyone help with this?

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Question 1. How long does a grep command take? I am following alone with a Linux book and was told to try grep, but it has been over 5 minutes now. Also how do I stop a command that is stuck or taking to long to process?

Grep shouldn't take long to complete; it depends in what situation you're using it. Please post the command you run which is taking a long time.

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How I currently have to stop bad commands is by stopping the VM player. I am guessing there is a way to force stop commands and processes like ctrl+Alt+Delete in windows. Can anyone help with this?

You should be able to stop a runaway command by pressing CTRL+C in the terminal window. If you want a CTRL+ALT+DELETE style method, you could run the command 'top' which will show the most system intensive processes, note down the PID (Process ID), then use the 'kill' command to kill of the screwey processes

Edited by iisjman07
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Grep shouldn't take long to complete; it depends in what situation you're using it. Please post the command you run which is taking a long time.

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I was at the root@bt prompt and I typed Grep "www Daemon" it took forever and I just decided to power off the VM and start over.

You should be able to stop a runaway command by pressing CTRL+C in the terminal window. If you want a CTRL+ALT+DELETE style method, you could run the command 'top' which will show the most system intensive processes, note down the PID (Process ID), then use the 'kill' command to kill of the screwey processes

Will try this next time.

Thanks for the reply, I see a lot of members viewed the thread but felt it was beneath them to answer it, I hope this attitude changes.

Questions Answered,thanks

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I see a lot of members viewed the thread but felt it was beneath them to answer it

Well, thats kind of the wrong attitude to have. Not everyone here is a linux guru, and for the questions you asked, google would have gotten you an answer quicker. You mentioned yourself you would check google first, so I won't harp on that, but in the future, don't expect everyone to come running with answers. We do our best to help others, but its not a requirement of the forums to answer every question asked. Even if we know the answer. Also want to add, there is a search feature on these forums. Sometimes, you can find the answers there as well before asking.

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Well, thats kind of the wrong attitude to have. Not everyone here is a linux guru, and for the questions you asked, google would have gotten you an answer quicker. You mentioned yourself you would check google first, so I won't harp on that, but in the future, don't expect everyone to come running with answers. We do our best to help others, but its not a requirement of the forums to answer every question asked. Even if we know the answer. Also want to add, there is a search feature on these forums. Sometimes, you can find the answers there as well before asking.

Trust me I Goggled, and there is so much useless info on the net it is hard to find correct answers. Hak5 is a site I trust and know I can get answers.

You stated that everyone is not a Linux Guru, that is true but we both know that at least 80% of the members here are Linux users. I did not ask how to change features of the Kernel or another question that only power users of Linux would know; I asked a question on something real common that any user of Linux would have a high probability of knowing. No I don't expect everyone to come running to answer my questions but I do know that most Computer, hacker, or whatever you want to call the groups or forums have this tendency to be hard on new comers; and most noobish questions or not worthy of a response.

Hak5 search option: I am well aware of the search box and did use it. When I keyed in Backtrack 5 there was not a whole lot of post, I entered in other search terms and could not find a answer to my question.

I hope you did not take my response the wrong way, but what I said I stand behind. I hope the attitude toward basic questions change. If you took time to click on a thread and read it and see the question asked has not been answered and you know the answer why not answer the question?

Hak5 is a great site and I find more reliable answers here than any other site on the net. I love the Hacker culture but I do wish something’s about it change and I feel Hak5 is more user friendly than most sites on the net.

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Google will get you answers faster and it's better to learn that way. There are probably thousands of beginner's tutorial sites.

Looking for a fast answer and being handed commands on a silver platter will get you nowhere. It's like learning another language, if someone is explaining a word to you, and you don't know what it means and you immediately use the dictionary, you're going to forget it a few minutes later. Instead of looking in the dictionary you need to describe what you don't understand to expand your vocabulary. Same thing in Linux, except explain it to google, not hak5. You will learn other extremely valuable info in the process instead of expecting a fast answer (that you'll forget 10 minutes later). Instead of asking "how do I terminate a process in the terminal" you need to be googling "basic terminal commands/functions" or something like that.

Besides, you need to know where to look for answers because if you posted everything you didn't understand here you would need your own forums, not your own thread :D

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If you read my post I stated that I am following alone with a Linux book, So I am trying to learn on my own.

Everyone replies Google your answers, Google is good and the ability to make websites, blogs and forums are so easy that every man, child and trained monkey can now get one. Along with that comes a overflow of data and a good chunk of it is useless. When you do get a good hit from Google where does google take you? to sites that have text pertaining to what you are asking, sometimes Google will point to Hak5; that's why I am here. No one is asking for "commands on a silver platter" as you put it. I stated what I do to stop Linux, I tried commands like exit, kill quit etc.. Nothing happened. so after trying different commands reading my book and googling I decided to ask here. If you feel my question is not worthy for you to answer that's cool, I just hope that others don't feel the same way.

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Google almost always delivers:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+to+stop+a+terminal+process&l=1

Also, don't limit yourself to just the hak5 forum for your answer,

The ubuntu forums hold alot of information that is nice to know and is

(generally) universely applicable to any linux distro.

Personally I don't think you should have started with BackTrack its a more specialized linux distro.

You should have eased yourself into it with Ubuntu or a distro similar (In my opinion).

I personally use Linux Mint as my go to Distro and when I am pentesting I use BackTrack.

Hope I helped.

-Remotesh

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Your point of why people didn't respond if they read and know the answer is invalid though. You have no idea if the people who did read, even knew the answer(s). For example, grep can run from a few seconds to a few minutes or longer. Posting the command you entered might also get someone to respond if they see you have the wrong syntax in use.

Google dork: "Linux + cancel program"

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1436&bih=744&q=Linux+%2B+cancel+program&oq=Linux+%2B+cancel+program&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=738l4993l0l5273l22l18l0l0l0l0l511l3644l0.2.5.3.1.1l12l0

If you want more help with grep, in a terminal, type "man grep". To get out of the man pages type : then q.

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Google almost always delivers:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+to+stop+a+terminal+process&l=1

Also, don't limit yourself to just the hak5 forum for your answer,

The ubuntu forums hold alot of information that is nice to know and is

(generally) universely applicable to any linux distro.

Personally I don't think you should have started with BackTrack its a more specialized linux distro.

You should have eased yourself into it with Ubuntu or a distro similar (In my opinion).

I personally use Linux Mint as my go to Distro and when I am pentesting I use BackTrack.

Hope I helped.

-Remotesh

Trust me, I tried all kind of commands, my win7 is just sluggish so I think that was the problem, I think i have a virus, i have ran all kinds of AV and rootkit detectors to clean it but I think I got something that is not beeing detected.

I thought BT was a bit to much as well, but a friend said i should just jump right into BT5, it would not be that bad. I am not trying any of the tools at all, I am just trying to learn terminal right now. My Host OS win7 is running so sluggish I am ready to just load BT on there solo, the only reason I am considering well have to do a dual boot is I have a lot of files that I need to back up, some are really big and all i have is CD's, no dvd's or external hard drives to store my info on when I trash windows.

second issue is I want to install BT but I only have a 2 gig usb stick.

Is there anyway I can break the Iso into smaller chuncks to fit on cd's rather than 1 DVD?

I will google it but while I am here I might as well ask.

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Invest in a 4GB USB stick(or larger) and use unetbootin to install it to a thumbdrive.

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Not sure if you figured out your grep issue, but I can't see an answer posted yet so I figured I should take a stab.

There are two ways to use grep. The first is to grep for something a file or files. To do this you provide grep with the search string and the files to look in.

grep root /etc/passwd /etc/shadow[code]

The second way is to grep for something from stdin (stdin means standard input, from the command line this is either going to be from the command line or from the output of another command piped into your grep command.

try
[code]grep frog

then type in a line of text containing "frog", the line will be repeated for you by grep. Then type in a line of text that doesn't contain "frog" and the line won't be repeated by grep. When you have finished playing press CTRL+D to end the command (CTRL+D sends an end of file to the program so it believes that stdin has been closed and stops running)

Now try

ps -elf | grep bash[code]

which will show you all processes that contain "bash" in their ps results, this is a very useful little trick as you can use it find the process id (PID) of a process that has hung or got stuck and then you can use the kill command to kill that process.

Now the most likely reason that your attempt at using grep took so long was that you had used it without piping into it or providing it with filenames to search, so it was sat waiting for input from the console. If that is the case then it will wait until it either receives a CTRL+D from the console or you kill the process.

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