Terminal Help Please!

[i.wanna.corndog]

Hey everyone,

 

I made the mistake of poking around in the com.apple.boot.plist file and can no longer boot into OS X (even in safe mode). I would rather not have to do a fresh install of OS X, so I'm trying to edit the file in the terminal using the bootable DVD. I got as far as switching the directory to the folder of com.apple.boot.plist, but cannot use nano to edit the file, because I presume it is not loaded (nano: command not found). How would I go about editing the file? (Or, does anyone have a simple fix for this?)

 

Thanks!

 

corndog

[lunchandamovie]

Does not pico work for you?

[Ted Shred]

pico tutorial

http://www.ncsu.edu/it/essentials/managing...ors/pico_tutor/

 

vi tutorial

http://www.eng.hawaii.edu/Tutor/vi.html

[i.wanna.corndog]

Neither pico nor nano work since I'm booting from the DVD...and I don't know about that VI program...I need to know how to load these, if this is possible. Most of what I know about the terminal I have learned from these forums, but I keep getting "nano: command not found" or "pico: command not found".

 

Any help?

corndog

[Ted Shred]

vi is easy.. you just need to get past a simple principle

that is recognizing the difference between command and edit mode.

 

needless to say there are many ways to get around and edit.

to do what you want you only need to know very few.

 

vi <filename>

<use arrow keys to move you where you want to begin to edit> <H,J,K,L are the original movement keys in command mode>

 

once you are at the beginning of what you want to edit, type i.

this will put you into edit mode at the current cursor location.

type in what you want.

press <escape> to go back into command mode

hit <x> to remove the old information you dont want.. this will remove text in front of the cursor or behind the cursor if there is none on the current line.

after you are done editing,

press <escape> again just to make sure you are in command mode.

then type :w

the colon ":" basically tells vi you want to perform a function.

:w will save the file with the current filename.

if it wont let you save the file by the same name for some reason,

":w filename" will save the file to whatever filename you provide.

you can later move the file form the command line with mv.

 

vi is the princess of unix text editors.

very graceful and efficient and not bloated like the others. once yoju are comfortable with it, you cna perform operations much faster than with just about any other text editor

 

good luck

[i.wanna.corndog]

My point is though, I do not have access to vi from the terminal when I boot from the DVD, so that is obviously not an option, unless you know of a way to get it working.

[i.wanna.corndog]

I've been thinking...I have got to be missing something here...

[i.wanna.corndog]

Okay...got it...called TextEdit from the Terminal with no problems...all back up and running again!

[Ted Shred]

glad you got it back up.. but if you couldnt get to vi from the command line. then you defiantely have a disk problem.

[Serphi]

How can you run TextEdit from the Terminal with the bootable DVD? I've got the same problem atm and don't feel like reinstalling either,. just need to edit one line in that file but I can't find how?

 

Pico/Nano etc. don't work because it's the terminal version from the bootable DVD. Not the 'real' one that comes with the Installed version.

 

I haven't got much terminal experience, but I could locate the TextEdit.app folder on my installed mac partition and all, only I don't know how to execute it?

[Rammjet]

open /Volumes/(name-of-OSX-partition)/Applications/TextEdit.app

[Serphi]

I'm getting '-bash: open: command not found', I've tried that too yeah. Or do I need to do something else first?

 

And 'exec' gives me the error 'cannot execute: Unknown error: 0'

 

And 'ed' gives me the error 'Read Only file system' which is correct because it's from a DVD,. but it won't open any stuff from my normal volume either.

Edited December 17, 2006 by Serph Nochnoy