Polarwave's OpenBSD
Tips and Tricks for Newbies

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Getting Help

Sometimes you read the man page, extra documentation that comes with a
package or port you installed, search all over the internet with your favorite
search engine, search through relevant mailing lists, and you just can't come
up with an answer. What do you do? Well, one choice is to ask your question
on a list like OpenBSD misc. But before you do, read OpenBSD Mailing Lists
guidelines thoroughly. Pay particular attention to the second paragraph under
Netiquette: DO YOUR HOMEWORK BEFORE YOU POST! If you don't, it's
quite possible you'll get an answer like RTFM! Nice acronym. It simply means
Read The Fine Manual or, something close to that, if you get my drift. :-)
I don't want to repeat everything else it says there, so I'll just add some things
I think, speaking from my own experiences, that may and probably will come up
in the ensuing dialogue, should you get an answer.

• Familiarize yourself with using the script command. It'll help you a lot in
  the event someone wants to see the output of the command you ran and are
  having problems with. Below these tips, you'll find an example of a scripted
  session:
  
  
• It seems like double work, but include everything you've tried, read, etc. It
  shows you've done your homework and that you're not just lazy and looking
  for a quick fix, but that you just don't understand. Or, that there really may
  be a problem or bug that needs addressing.
  
  
• Some things in the different BSD's are not the same. Terminal code is a good
  example. I ran into a problem like that before, trying to ssh into an XP box
  from an OpenBSD box. The XP box was running Cygwin with a rather fancy
  bash prompt. I could ssh in, but after it accepted my password, it just hung
  there. I had previously used ssh a lot from a FreeBSD box without problems
  and had assumed both systems operated the same in instances like that. I
  found out differently. All that being said, many, many commands are basically
  the same. So, just because you don't find the answer to your problem on one
  of the OpenBSD mailing lists doesn't mean you won't find it on maybe the
  FreeBSD mailing lists. It pays to look around. You run into lots of good info
  all over the 'nix' world.
  

$ cd /usr/local/bin/
$ script ~/example.out
Script started, ouput file is /home/myusername/example.out
$ find *.sh -print

No point in showing the output twice since it's shown in the file example.out
after the script finishes.

$ Ctrl-d (hold down the Ctrl key and tap the d key)
Script done, output file is /home/myusername/example.out

$ cd
$ cat example.out

And here's the content of the scripted session:

Script started on Tue Jan 1 23:09:31 2008
^M
mybox.myisp.net^M
23:09:31 Tue Jan 01^M
myusername /usr/local/bin
$ find .^H ^H*.sh -print^M^M
Etcolors.sh^M
Etmenu.sh^M
amuFormat.sh^M
anytovcd.sh^M
belkinstatus.sh^M
etcdbchgd.sh^M
fclamroll.sh^M
fig2ps2tex.sh^M
gettext.sh^M
lav2avi.sh^M
lprsetup.sh^M
notifyme.sh^M
pkgchgs.sh^M
pv.sh^M
rollbelkin.sh^M
unix-lpr.sh^M
^M
mybox.myisp.net^M
23:09:44 Tue Jan 01^M
myusername /usr/local/bin^M
$ ^D^M^M
Script done on Tue Jan 1 23:09:49 2008

To remove the ^M and ^H characters, open the file in vim or vi and use this command:

:%s/^M//g

The "^M" in the above line has to be typed in by pressing CTRL+v and then CTRL+M.
Repeat the procedure to remove the ^H characters:

:%s/^H//g

$ dmesg > dmesg.out

:r! dmesg

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