[comp.sys.dec] poking around partial or trashed systems

mjr@hussar.dco.dec.com (Marcus J. Ranum) (10/18/90)

In article <88858@aerospace.AERO.ORG> sinclair@aerospace.aero.org (William S. Sinclair) writes:

>By the way, is there anything that tells me what the stand-alone 
>ULTRIX can or can't do? It won't even do an "ls" command. How do I find 
>my way around in it?

	as long as you can get a shell running, you can do the moral
equivalent of "ls" using echo, EG:
echo *
echo /bin/*

	you can even do a fair emulation of the "cat" command using:
(while read line; do echo $line; done) < /etc/passwd

	if you have a shell with a built-in test(1) then there's a
whole lot you can do.

mjr.
-- 
Nothing is beautiful unless it is large. Vastness and immensity can make 
you forget a great many weaknesses.
			- Emperor Napoleon I

steven@uicadd.csl.uiuc.edu (Steven Parkes) (10/18/90)

|> 	you can even do a fair emulation of the "cat" command using:
|> (while read line; do echo $line; done) < /etc/passwd

In this context (ram kernal) dd exists so I find

	dd if=/etc/passwd

much easier.