Adding or editing an entry in /etc/hosts

[Danny Colligan]

>
> On Sat, 2007-01-06 at 09:37 -0500, Brian Lunergan wrote:
> > Rebel Lion wrote:
> > >  See what ifconfig tells you, you shouldn't need sudo for that, you
> are going
> > > to have hassles trying to edit the hosts file though because you need
> to be
> > > sudo to do it. You are probably going to have to login in recovery
> mode to
> > > fix it.
> > >
> >
> > That's the direction I went. Started up in recovery mode through grub,
> logged in
> > as root, and cd /etc to drop into the directory. That's where I'm stuck
> for the
> > moment. Using gedit in the gnome desktop is easy enough (if I weren't
> locked out
> > in read only for not being the owner in that environment) but I'm still
> too much
> > of a neophyte to know what command I use to open and edit the hosts file
> from
> > the command line as root.
> >
> > Thoughts??
> >
>
> Hi,
>
> sudo vim hosts
>
> vim is my preferred text editor, if your not familiar with vim type
> vimtutor at command line.
>
> William S.


Telling someone unfamiliar with terminal based-editors to use vim is almost
certainly a Bad Idea (tm).  Not to say that Vim isn't a great editor (my
favorite, as well) but he'll probably end up butchering his file in the
process.  ("Hey, it's not typing anything when I push letters!  And now it's
beeping at me!  Aha, here is something... wait, how come those letters were
just erased?")  Better to use something that isn't modal and doesn't have
such a steep learning curve to be minimally functional such as emacs or nano
to avoid creating another problem in addition to his current one.

If you are learning a terminal-based text editor and are in it for the long
haul, however, vim is an excellent option to consider.

Danny Colligan
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