Homework & Coursework Questions

If none of this was explained by your teacher, lecturer, or whoever, then it is right to assume it has been given to you as an exercise in research.

Research doesn't generally entail telling everyone what you need and expecting to get the answer.

Have you Googled any of the stuff you're looking for?

Of course I have searched through Google looking for my answers. I was using these forums as a last effort to finish the assignment.

I don't know that there are single commands ("a command") to do exactly what you need.

So it might be that you need to find the command that gets generally what you're looking for, and then use other commands, like awk, sed, cut and grep, etc. to extract the exact information you need.

Which version of what Linux are you using, and what shell?

Could you give me any hints as to what sort of commands I could look into for more information?

As much of what you are looking for is network-related, perhaps that would be a good place to start?

Let me google that for you

Additionally, I am sure you must have used the ps command? With the right options, that can also show the date when a process starteed. Here's a link to the man page: ps(1).

There's PERL, which is a "practical extraction and reporting language". It can be a bit overwhelming for newbies, so if you need to "extract" anything from ps or any of the network commands, I would suggest using awk!

1 : Finding the first process: once youve mastered a bit ps command it should not be too difficult to find the requested... it must be PID 0 or 1 or...
You are to look at the man pages for ps syntax differ between OS (e.g ps ax v.s. ps -ef...)

Here is a tip: you can find a man page by entering

Code:

man <command>

but this assumes that you know which command you look for. You can also search the man database for keywords by using the "-k" switch.

Code:

man -k foo

will display a list of all articles involving "foo". You can then start to read these articles one by one. Also useful: at the end of each man page there is usually a paragraph labeled "SEE ALSO". I suggest you do exactly this.

For instance:

You sure know the network protocol which maps layer-2 (MAC) addresses to layer-3 (IP) addresses, don't you? Now, enter this as a keyword in a "man" search and you might find some useful references.

I hope this helps.

bakunin