----- Original Message ----- From: "Alvin Murphy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2002 7:18 AM Subject: [luau] Basic help
> I am a little embarrassed to show my ignorance, but here goes. In the Never feel afraid to ask a question, but always try Google first and try to follow the guidelines within "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" by Eric S. Raymond http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html > midst of trying to recover from a mess of my Mandrake 8.1 because of > problems installing and uninstalling Win4Lin, I ran out of room on > /home/alvin. I was able to move some files to "trash" but some would > not, for instance the huge file "install" created by OpenOffice. > Nautilus tells me I cannot move or delete the directory because it does > not belong to me, it belongs to root. I went to a terminal and changed > to supervisor-root, but that made no difference. I wrote "chmod a+rwx > /home/alvin/install" but that made no difference. Can anyone tell me > what I need to do? Also some files that I was able to move to trash, > same problem in that I cannot empty trash because I am not owner. I also > do not know where "trash" is so cannot reach it from terminal. Thanks. Try changing the owner. (substitute appropriate names) chown -R username.groupname /home/alvin/install Then do a recursive delete. rm -rf /home/alvin/install Be VERY CAREFUL with "rm -rf" because it has the potential to destroy your entire system. One could too easily do "rm -rf /" or "rm -rf *" with disasterous consequences. I remember doing something similar with "DELTREE *.*" back in the DOS days... (On the bright side, that forced me to learn how to re-install DOS back in the day.)
