Dolphin starts programs with a wrong current directory

[Duncan]

genericmaillists posted on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:53:50 -0500 as excerpted:

> pwd on cli will show you what directory you are in... Present Working
> Directory. explain what you are talking about with PWD and $HOME

$PWD is the shell variable often containing the same directory that would 
be output by the pwd command.  $HOME is the shell variable normally 
containing a user's home directory -- another way to denote that is ~/ .

FWIW... One of the best moves I ever made was when I got serious about 
Linux, and decided that if I were to actually get anywhere useful with it 
(I'd had linux as a dual-boot for some time, but I just don't like 
rebooting, and I didn't know what I was doing, so it mostly just sat 
there), I'd need to get serious about Linux documentation.

So I asked on my ISP's newsgroup, that ISP at the time having a rather 
high concentration of *ix users, if anyone had recommendations for good 
Linux books, several hundred pages thick, that could serve as a good 
orientation.  Years before, Using DOS 6 had done that for DOS for me, but 
since then, I had tried many other books  with far less success, so I 
decided to use the wisdom of the net to find a solution that would 
actually be worth the money I was paying for it.

Of the recommendations, two books stood out as recommended by multiple 
people.  I bought them both.  As it happens, they're both published by 
O'Reilly Publishing.  The first book, Running Linux, was in its third 
edition then and is now in at least its fifth.  It's arranged much like a 
textbook or tutorial might be, with easy stuff at the front, more complex 
stuff building on it toward the back.  That really got me going in Linux.

The second book was Linux in a Nutshell, which is also known as "The 
Arabian", for the illustration on the front. (Such illustrations are an 
O'Reilly theme, very nearly all their tech books have a similar 
illustration of some animal or other.)  Again, it was in its third 
printing then, and is in its sixth now.  I know because I just bought my 
fthird copy of it!  They wear out after a few years!  This book is much 
more a reference book.  A blurb on one edition a few years ago described 
it something like this.  "More useful than a stack of printed manpages, 
and MUCH more portable."  That's a reasonably accurate description of the 
majority of the book, but they've taken care to make the command 
descriptions much more accessible to the ordinary user than many manpages 
are.  IOW, it's not simply copying the manpages, but "translating" them 
into "English".  There's somewhat more detailed appendixes on the more 
complex topics, bash scripting, regular expressions, sed, gawk, etc.  
Really, the part that gets the most use here and the reason I keep it 
within arm's length from the computer is the bash section, which I have 
bookmarked, with the bookmark on the page covering the "test" command, 
the quicker to look it up when I'm shell scripting something or other.

Both books are very good in that they're reasonably distribution neutral, 
sticking for the most part to the command line, and commands available in 
all or most distributions.  Of course, stuff like package managers, etc, 
is an exception to that, but they cover rpm and yum, as well as debian.  
One of the reasons I upgraded to the new version a couple weeks ago, 
however (ther than the old one being all ragged, with a missing back 
cover, from use...), was the newer coverage on git and a couple other 
things.

A Linux or just CLI (command line interface) newbie could do far worse 
than getting and reading these books.  I figure it saved me at least 3 
months workth of full time equivilent (so 40 hours/wk for three months) 
screwing around, trying to figure things out on my own.  At even minimum 
wage, how much would /that/ be worth?  Yet if you check online or buy 
them at Fry's Electronics as I did, you can get them at a reasonable 
discount off of suggested retail.  I think I paid ~$70 for the two of 
them back in 2001, and the 900-ish page Linux in a Nutshell I just bought 
still has the sticker on it -- $32.98 Fry's price, $49.99 suggested 
retail.

(No, I do /not/ work for them or something!  I'm just an incredibly 
satisfied user -- obviously, if I just both my third copy of the one 
book, but the other is more valuable for a beginner, less so for an 
experienced user and personal systems sysadmin.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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