Your Room in the Tower
Hello. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Professor Meotod, andI’ll be your instructor in several of the workings of the UnixSpellcraft. With luck and hard work, under my tutelage, you willadvance your knowledge to the point where it becomes easy for you tolearn new things outside of the classroom, and use them for the goodof the tower. Perhaps even one day, you may decide to build your owntower. But first things first.
I have spoken with the tower manager, and you have been affordedpermanent lodging in the tower. Your room is located in the /homewing, and you can enter by speaking your name and password whenentering the tower.. For example, my room can be found at/home/meotod. Because of protective spells placed upon it, anyoneother than myself will have a difficult time obtaining entry. Youshould find that to be the case your rooms as well.Now, about your rooms. Your rooms will be the first place you seewhenever you enter the tower. All of your personal affects may bestored there, and should you ever decide to take up the art ofspell-smithing, these may be stored there as well. Also, certainspells you invoke may create scrolls there, permitting them to act inways which you are able to change, by modifying the scrolls.
The most interesting part of your home in the castle is your abilityto create rooms inside of it. To create a room, utilize the “mkdir”spell. Since rooms are known as “directories” in the common parlance,it is shorthand for “make directory”. If you need help with remedialspells, remember to pick up a copy of “Unix for the Beginning Mage”.
Go to your room, and look around. You might not see much, besides acouple of rooms, and it looks pretty empty. That may be because you’renot looking for HIDDEN items. Assuming you are using “bash” as yourspellcasting environment (you can check by uttering the “ps” spell,and usually the first thing that is listed is your “shell”), then ascroll in your home directory will be created called .bash_history.Every time you cast a spell, or move about in the tower, it isrecorded on this scroll. Keep in mind that no one except yourself (andthe tower administrators) can read this. There are protective spellsguarding this scroll to prevent that from happening. If you don’t wishto read this scroll every time you want to look at your previousactions, the spell “history” can show you what you are looking for.
In addition to the .bash_history file, you may find others, dependingon the configuration of your tower. It is beyond the scope of thisclass to go into all that you are likely to find, however if you talkto a more experienced mage or wizard, or even your toweradministrator, they may be able to explain what the particular filesare.
I hope you enjoyed this brief walk through of your home in the tower,and come back for the next class, which is entitled “ProtectiveSpells”.
Posted by Matt on Saturday, November 4th, 2006