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The sh and shroot Commands

During an Inst session, it is possible to invoke a shell, enter shell commands, and return to Inst without ending the session. This procedure is useful for removing user files to free disk space. Use either of these commands to invoke a shell from the Administrative Commands menu:

Admin> sh
Admin> shroot
The sh command invokes a regular shell and the shroot command invokes a chroot(1M) shell. By default, the shell is specified by the SHELL environment variable and is usually set to /bin/sh or /bin/csh. To invoke a different shell, use the set command to specify it:

Admin> set shell shell_path

Note: When you use the sh command during a miniroot installation, remember that the root and user filesystems are mounted as /root and /root/user. But if you use shroot, the root is changed to /root and pathnames are unnecessary for most commands. For this reason, using shroot is usually preferable to using sh. Miniroot installations impose some limits on what can be done with sh and shroot. Since the miniroot supports only a subset of IRIX commands, commands in /root and /root/usr might be unavailable or incompatible with the miniroot kernel. If you are installing from a local distribution source, you cannot use sh or shroot to access remote systems. If you are using a remote distribution source, you can access the distribution server.


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