EmmonsNet

I have a friend who I recently turned on to Linux. A few months ago his frustration level with Windows prompted him to call me - begging to help him install Linux on a second drive he just dropped into his home desktop computer. A few hours later we had the latest release of Fedora installed.

Since that day, he has called me up for a few tips from time to time on how to do things. Until last night, all of his queries were easily answered over the phone or instant messanger. But last night, he called me frantic.

'My terminal console is Fracked!!! I just echos garbage characters.'

This I had to see. Ten minutes later I was sitting in front of his desktop and sure enough, his terminal session was echoing nothing but unreadable characters.

'What was the last thing you did before this started happening?' 

'I wanted to know more about "cat", so I typed "/usr/bin/man cat"'.

Right then, I knew what we did. Why did I know? Because when I was a linux neophyte ( aka NEWB ), I did the same thing myself more than once. I inverted words at the command line and sometimes it gave spectacular and terrifying results.

In this instance he more than likely typed "cat /usr/bin/man". 'cat' is a utility that concatenates files and prints their contents to the standard output ( like the terminal ). 'man' is a binary executable. When you 'cat' a plain text or ascii file, you see the results echoed out just fine. But if you cat a binary file, it echoes the binary contents of that file to the terminal console and hoses it completely. All interaction with that terminal session afterwards will echo out pretty much what you see in the image above.

For the linux newcomer, this can be worrysome. Especially if they are a refugee from windows.

To return his terminal console to normal I typed 'reset' at the command line and hit 'enter'.

Viola! All better. Or, you can just close the console terminal and open a new one. Either way, the issue will be resolved.

My friend was releaved and I came out looking like a guru. Well, that is what he called me. 

I can't claim to be a linux guru, because I don't feel that I am. What I can claim to be is somebody who has learned from the errors he has made while working with linux since 1995.