A freind of mine sent me instructions to install logwatch script on my VPS, and in the instructions he wrote:

Install with flags to update if previously installed

My question is: What is ment by "with flags". I feel that I should know this but my brain is not functioning and my freind is off on vacation so I ask the freindly WHT community for a light.

Thanks :gthumb:

Means something like

install --update

Thanks for the tip. Do you happen to know where can I learn about other flags and their uses? I have searched a few linux doc sites for "flags" but have not found what I am looking for. Seems like something I should know about.

Well these are almost always program specific, so there is no 'default' flag set that you can just lookup. Each program can define its own command line arguments (which is the correct term).

For example, ls has the common -l (for long) -a (for all files) etc. Most (not all) *nix binaries provide a help argument that will list common usage. Generally this is in the form of --help or -h. Try it out on your own system and see the results. Try ls --help.

Some arguments actually expect values. An example of this is the --color argument of the ls command. You can pass it --color=auto, --color=always, and --color=never. Also, most arguments (but not all) have a long and a short version. The long version starts with two -- and the short with one -.

Again, using ls you can pass it -s or --size to print the size of a file in blocks. However, note that -s is not the same as -S which sorts by file size. So, arguments are case-sensitive.

Finally, you can always look up the man or info page of a command to find out its usage summary (which will list all arguments and what they expect as parameters).

Hope this helps :)

Very helpful explanaition. Thank you. :gthumb:

Having a VPS has thrown me into *nix command line, I have been trying to learn but it can be a slow process at times.

Thanks again.