Making Things Talk

28 MAKING THINGS TALK

Once you’ve connected to the remote web server, you

should see something like this:

Last login: Wed Feb 22 08:50:04 2006 from 216.157.45.215

[userid@myhost ~]$

Now you’re at the command prompt of your web host’s

computer, and any command you give will be executed on

that computer. Start off by learning what directory you’re

in. To do this, type the following:

pwd

which stands for “print working directory.” It asks the

computer to list the name and pathname of the directory

in which you’re currently working. You’ll see that many

Unix commands are very terse, so you have to type less.

The downside of this is that it makes them harder to

remember. The server will respond with a directory path,

such as:

/home/igoe

This is the home directory for your account. On many

web servers, this directory contains a subdirectory called

public_html or www, which is where your web files belong.

Files that you place in your home directory (that is, outside

or www or public_html) can’t be seen by web visitors.

NOTE: You should check with your web host to learn how the files

and directories in your home directory are set up.

To find out what files are in a given directory, use the list

(ls) command, like so:

ls –l .

NOTE: The dot is shorthand for “the current working directory.”

Similarly, a double dot is shorthand for the directory (the parent

directory) that contains the current directory ...