The file system used by the mud is based on a unix file system and uses many
of its features.
The system is a hierarchy with the root being at the top. The root is
specified using the character '/'.
The file system then has the concept of directories and files. The files
contain information and the directories can contain more files and directories.
You have the concept of your current directory. The root is a directory and to
set your current directory to it, you would type 'cd /'. After doing this,
doing an ls would get you something like :
371 LP_SWAP.3.bilbo.resmel.bhp.com.au
45 bilbo.resmel.bhp.com.au.debug.log
2 ACCESS.ALLOW 5 Makefile 1 NEWS
1 WELCOME 1 WIZNEWS 1 access.allow
8 doc/ 20 failsafe/ 15 global/
13 include/ 11 log/ 43 lpmud.log7
18 obj/ 2 open/ 26 players/
13 room/ 5 save/ 11 secure/
33 std/ 0 tmp/ 14 w/
All of the names followed by '/' are directories. To set your current directory
to one of these directories, you would type cd without the '/'. As an
example, we will take the room directory. To cd into it, you would type
cd room
when you type ls now, you would get something like:-
Dir of: /room/
16 DETAILS 1 README 85 am/
13 armours/ 37 death/ 1 discworld.map
32 for/ 6 goa/ 6 ram/
19 treasures/ 47 uu/ 1 void.c
12 weapons/
Now you might want to get back to the root directory again. There are two
ways you can do this. There exist two special directories. These directories
are '.' and '..'. The '.' directory refers to the directory you are in. The
'..' directory refers to the one above you in the hierarchy. To get back to the
root directory, you could either type 'cd /' or 'cd ..'. The reason that 'cd /'
works is that you are specifying a global path. Because you prepend the '/',
the filename is taken as being specified from the root. The reason the '..'
works is that the root directory is one level above you in the hierarchy.
If you wanted to get to the players directory from the /room/ directory, there
are a number of ways you could do it. Here are some:-
cd ..
cd players
cd /
cd players
cd /players
cd ../players
All of these commands would work. This is because you have two ways of
specifying paths. The first is relative. This means you specify a path to
get to where you want to go from where you currently are. This is the done
using the '..' characters. You tell the mud to go out one directory and then
in to the players directory. You can do this in one step by putting a '/'
between the two directories. The other way to specify a path is to specify the
absolute path. This is done by putting a '/' at the start of the name. After
the '/' you specify each of the directories to take, seperating each of them
with a '/'. In this manner, you can specify any file in the file system, but
if you have many directories, the name might get very long. If your current
directory was /w/furball/guild/code/test and you wanted to specify the file
/w/furball/guild/code/test/test.c, you could do it by specifying test.c as the
mud will always prepend your current path to file names. If you wanted to
specify the absolute filename, you would have to type
/w/furball/guild/code/test/test.c which would get very annoying very quickly.
Several commands exist to enable the manipulation of directories and files.
First there is the mkdir and rmdir commands. These are used to make new
directories and remove them when no longer needed. The rmdir command will let
remove an empty directory. The mkdir command will create a directory with the
specified name.
The cd command is used to negotiate your way around the directory structure.
The cp and mv command allow you to copy and move files around in your
directory. You can move files or directories, but you can only copy files.
The process of copying just makes an identical duplicate of the original file
specified in a new file that you also specify. The process of moving a file
has much the same result except that rather than a new file being made, the
old one is just moved to the new position.
The rm command is similar to rmdir except that it is designed to be used on
files, not directories. It will remove unwanted files from the file system.
Warning: Using this command destroys the file. Any file that you rm is
unrecoverable and gone forever. Be careful using rm.
