On Sun, 2003-08-17 at 04:52, Margot wrote:
Miark wrote:
On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 18:41:22 +0100, Margot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Thanks Miark, glad I've got the right tool at least, but what I need to know now is how to use it - real beginner here!
Where in gFTP do I input the domain name, username and password? How do I tell it what files to upload? As I said, can't find a manual, and I've never done this before!
Margot
Margot,
All the information in a Mandrake system (or any modern System V type os for that matter) will be stored in /usr/share/doc. If you go there and do an ls you will see what I mean. If you have questions about any program in the future, look for that program's documentation directory in /usr/share/doc.
From there you go down into the directory containing the information youare looking for. Here I note that the dir containing gftp on my system is
/usr/share/doc/gftp-2.0.14/
Unfortunately when I descend down into that dir, the information given
there is rather sparse. The README contains a FAQ which seems somewhat
helpful, but I suspect what you were seeking was an in - depth manual. This is sometimes the bane of free software; the authors spend so much
time debugging and programming that they often forget that thorough
documentation is needed; or more poignantly they don't have the personal
resources to fulfill that need.
As a last resort I sometimes end up going to the author's homepage for the project. In the case of gftp it is http://www.gftp.org/, which I got from /usr/share/doc/gftp-2.0.14/README. ;)
Unfortunately I don't get the feel from the homepage that this is what you are really looking for either. There is a FAQ listed there but no usage type information. It is sad but in this case it is assumed that the user already has operational knowledge of the program interface; and this is not always the case. This is something that needs to be addressed across the board with all Linux programs if Linux is truly going to be an OS for the people by the people.
One last place I check for documentation; the source. Nearly always you can find more documentation there than you can anywhere else. For this you download the tar.gz version of the program (it is assumed when downloading a tar.gz package that you are either installing to /usr/local/blah or you want to compile, which neither one we want to do in this case), and then just unpack the source in a tmp directory. From there look for the documentation dir, and start scanning.
HTH,
LX
Thanks for the information - I'd had a look at the FAQ on the website, but I didn't understand the questions, let alone the answers! Not really suitable for a total newbie like me. It never occurred to me to download the prog for documentation as I already had the prog already that came with Mandrake - another useful tip to add to my file. What would I do without this list?
Margot
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