For People New to Both FreeBSD and Unix

Annelise Anderson

August 15, 1997

Congratulations on installing FreeBSD! This introduction is for people new to both FreeBSD and Un*x--so it starts with basics. It assumes you are using version 2.0.5 or later of FreeBSD as distributed by BSDi or FreeBSD.org, your system (for now) has a single user (you)--and you are probably pretty good with DOS/Windows or OS/2.

1 Logging in and Getting Out

Log in (when you see login:) as a user you created during installation or as root. (Your FreeBSD installation will already have an account for root; root can go anywhere and do anything, including deleting essential files, so be careful!) The symbols % and # in the following stand for the prompt (yours may be different), with % indicating an ordinary user and # indicating root.

To log out (and get a new login: prompt) type

    # exit

as often as necessary. Yes, press enter after commands, and remember that Unix is case-sensitive--exit, not EXIT.

To shut down the machine type

    # /sbin/shutdown -h now

Or to reboot type

    # /sbin/shutdown -r now

    # /sbin/reboot

You can also reboot with Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Give it a little time to do its work. This is equivalent to /sbin/reboot in recent releases of FreeBSD and is much, much better than hitting the reset button. You do not want to have to reinstall this thing, do you?

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