so when we were down this am, i prowled the intertubes about DNS cache. i decided that a vague understanding of what it is will work for me. i also found that to dump it in 10.5, i should open terminal and type ~

dscacheutil -flushcache

i launched terminal and . . . i didn't have the nerve. i mean that stuff's for heavy hitters, right? but if i had wanted to try it, what? would i hit return and then paste after ~


Last login: Thu Aug 12 08:58:03 on ttys000
lea-hiltys-mac-pro:~ Lea$

[that's what's in the terminal window now] and hit return again? and how much of a nuke action would that be? would it zero out all my bookmarks? a few are ultra critical and the txdot ones are a complete bitch to reset.

ok, questions from a broad looking to expand her macbabeness.

as always, much grass [DEA bite me]

LL

A broken arm ain't fatal, Lea. Don't go terminal on us!

Don't forget to flush. You got it right with the commands, start typing after the $.

I tried that, also restarted modem router etc. The problem isn't on our end.

As far as being able to bring your system down with terminal, it can happen. In the press of a key. The worst I did was change the privileges on the /usr/ folder and its sub folders, many subfolders, too many to even begin to know which had what permissions. It didn't cause a problem that I could see, but permissions were too wide open, had to use Time Machine to back up a day.

There is the possibly fatal sudo rm (remove) command that when done in the wrong way can remove every file from your HD with the press of the Enter key. Seems like that would be quite unnerving.

What you really have to watch is if you do sudo in a command, "super user do," priveleges to do anything. You will be asked for an admin password if you do a sudo command.

Even as geeky as I am, I personally feel that it's 2010 so terminal is a last resort for me, I look for something with a GUI.

well, good. my caution was/is warranted. breathe easy, yoyo. i will not go terminal.



hell, just lookin' at that little unassuming window was unnerving, like walking up on a sleepy rattle snake. and yeah ~ been there, slooooowly backed away done that. [shudder]


thank you

LL

Yeah, it's for the really knowledgeable folks to mess with. Why do you think it's called "terminal?"



Actually, I have used it to run trusted commands, but not just to peck around in there.

Here's an easy one: type uptime and hit return. If you want a more detailed display, type it in all caps.

top brings up a bunch of useless memory stuff too. And it's easy to type.

Shows active processes.

I don't know if I'd call it useless.

To the common user it's useless. I use top all the time though. Not so much on my machine but when I go in to work on another machine. If there are thousands of pageouts the machine needs more RAM. I also use it to see how much RAM the system actually needs to boot up. Most of the other carp I don't use though.

Have a look at Rixstep's free CLIX suite of utilities. It wraps hundreds of command line operations in a super fast, super lightweight GUI. It's pretty amazing, and I'm surprised CLIX doesn't get mentioned more often.

Their other utilities & apps look pretty good too, but I haven't tried them.