[sf-lug] NEED INFO ABOUT BOOT SECTOR, SPACE LIMITS

[Rick Moen]

Elaborating:

> Also, maybe you should do the wise thing Daniel suggested you do.  He
> said:
> 
>    Please paste the output of this command:
>    df -h

Relevant to that, recently I wrote on another mailing list:


Quoting [a querent]:

> Do I need to send screen shots?

For terminal commands, what's a great deal better is a transcript,
preferably pruned of any irrelevant chunks.  To record one, use
'script'.  Here's how it works:


  [rick at linuxmafia]
  ~ $ script
  Script started, file is typescript
  [rick at linuxmafia]
  ~ $ cd /tmp
  [rick at linuxmafia]
  /tmp $ df -h .
  Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  /dev/sda7             897M  393M  457M  47% /
  [rick at linuxmafia]
  /tmp $ ls -la /boot
  [RM; snip directory listing]
  [rick at linuxmafia]
  /tmp $ exit
  exit
  Script done, file is typescript
  [rick at linuxmafia]
  ~ $


Here, 'script' starts a subshell, all of whose input and output gets
logged to disk into a file, whose name by default is 'typescript'.
After doing that, I carrt out several commands whose input and output
one might want to post.  At the end, I type 'exit' to close the subshell
and close logfile 'typescript'.

So then, your posting can absolutely precisely recount what you did and
what the system said in response -- with no need to retype!  You would,
continuing the example above, copy text file 'typescript' onto a USB flash
drive, umount (dismount) the flash drive, plug the flash drive into your
desktop computer where you send and receive mail, and include the text
contents in your mailing list post.

As a rough rule of thumb, it's considered annoying on mailing lists to
include _long_ command output, where perception of 'too long' differs,
but many of us would draw the line at 50 or so lines.  A alternative to
posting very long text blocks is to host a copy on Pastebin.com or a
similar free-of-charge site, and post the URL.