[luau] Basic help

[Warren Togami]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alvin Murphy" <amurphy at hawaii.rr.com>
To: <luau at videl.ics.hawaii.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2002 7:18 AM
Subject: [luau] Basic help


> I am a little embarrassed to show my ignorance, but here goes. In the

Never feel afraid to ask a question, but always try Google first and try to
follow the guidelines within
"How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" by Eric S. Raymond
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

> midst of trying to recover from a mess of my Mandrake 8.1 because of
> problems installing and uninstalling Win4Lin, I ran out of room on
> /home/alvin. I was able to move some files to "trash" but some would
> not, for instance the huge file "install" created by OpenOffice.
> Nautilus tells me I cannot move or delete the directory because it does
> not belong to me, it belongs to root. I went to a terminal and changed
> to supervisor-root, but that made no difference. I wrote "chmod a+rwx
> /home/alvin/install" but that made no difference. Can anyone tell me
> what I need to do? Also some files that I was able to move to trash,
> same problem in that I cannot empty trash because I am not owner. I also
> do not know where "trash" is so cannot reach it from terminal. Thanks.

Try changing the owner. (substitute appropriate names)
chown -R username.groupname /home/alvin/install

Then do a recursive delete.
rm -rf /home/alvin/install

Be VERY CAREFUL with "rm -rf" because it has the potential to destroy your
entire system.  One could too easily do "rm -rf /" or "rm -rf *" with
disasterous consequences.  I remember doing something similar with "DELTREE
*.*" back in the DOS days...

(On the bright side, that forced me to learn how to re-install DOS back in
the day.)