UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

What about joe, pico or elvis?

cybermike, we try to keep things G rated around here. You might want to reread our rules. Link at the bottom of the page.

It might take 10 minutes to learn ed...as least enough of it to delete the root password. You could spend days on regular expressions, but you don't need to be a regular expression guru for this.

And as a bonus, you would also learn its brother, sed, which continues to be a useful tool. System administrators really need to use ed every once in a while. This would be 10 minutes well spent.

Why can't you run passwd?

Another alternative is to correct the problems that are prohibiting you from using vi. That would typically involve mounting /usr and setting the TERM.

i mounted /usr and got access to 'vi' and also 'passwd' changed the root pass and logged in. Here a short guide on how to do when or if the problem arises for somebody else:

How to recover root password on Utrix 4.4 or DECsystem 5100, proberly works on other systems as well.

Boot the system, when the fsck begins (harddisk checking) press ctrl+c (might be names 'code' instead of 'ctrl' if your on a vt420 terminal)

You will now be granted with a root promt in singelmode, now type 'mount /usr' and then 'passwd' you will now be asked for the password you want to set to be roots, type it in, afterwards it will ask you to repeat, do that to.

Now type reboot and log in with your new password.

pederabo: My previous post was writen when i got it to work, but forgot to click 'post' but as you se i figured it out

Thanks everybody for trying to help.

And. btw sorry for the swearing, i read the rules when i signed up about a year ago, sorry.