On Tue, 22 Apr 2003, Michael Kahle wrote: > To clear up why I became root to do this operation... I thought it faster > than copying the file somewhere else and then gunzip-ing the file. I > thought it faster to type su and then password then to copy the file into > another location and have my way with it. The problem with having my own > unix box is that I can bail myself out of tons of permissions situations > just by becoming root. Very very bad, I know. If I could have become > familiar with Unix without having to set one up myself first, I would most > likely have developed better habits than I have now. > > I would type the following: > > $ gzip -d filename.gz > Gzip: changelog: Permission denied > $ > > So, I was in /usr/share/doc/, and I didn't have permissions to change the > files that existed in there. Which is why I had to be root to do the > decompress operation as above. I could have copied the file to somewhere > else and then did it as non superuser. But as we all know, this is silly. > There are far better ways to do this than I had been doing and I'm glad I > asked. There is a faster, nonroot way to uncompress that file to another file. Try "gzip -c filename.gz > ~/myfile.txt" What this does is uncompress the file and pipes it to the terminal (standard output, actually), then the ">" symbol tells it to write whatever should be written to the terminal to the following file "~/myfile.txt", where the "~" symbol is shorthand for "my home directory". As a footnote: ">>" will append instead of write to a file. "~user" (where user is a valid name) is a shortcut to the user's home directory. ~ Jesse Meyer -- ...crying "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"... ~ HPL icq : 34583382 | === ascii ribbon campaign === msn : dasunt@hotmail.com | () - against html mail yim : tsunad | /\ - against proprietary attachments
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