view a file in putty

I recently got a server and I have to

Your 'root' password can be found in the home directory for
in a file called 'su.txt' please copy the password and REMOVE the 'su.txt' file ASAP.

I have logged in and I don't know what to do from there.

Help
Please

 

You use linux commands to navigate in ssh (putty). I'm not a born linux user, but I can get around well enough, and prefer it for web stuff over windows. When I first started messing with SSH, I found it easies to relate the commands to DOS commands. Some of the basic commands are:

ls - list files in a directory (like dir in DOS)
cd - change directory (like cd in DOS)
rm - delete a file or folder (this is the command you need, you want to type rm su.txt, once you find the right directory)
find - use this to locate a file (type find su.txt, then rm su.txt)

if you want to read the file, you'll need to use vi (eg vi su.txt) use zz to exit...

 

thanks I'll try it

 

the linux command 'cat' types out a file. the 'vi' command edits it. Either should work.

i.e -
cat su.txt
will dump the file to your screen in putty

vi su.txt
will bring up an editor where you can edit it (and of course view the contents as a result).

It's worth spending some time learning command line stuff on linux, the possibilities are amazing. for example 'grep' filters content based on certain strings. And the '>' will dump output out to a file. So you could do something like this:
cat yourlogfile.txt|grep 404
which would type out your logfiles, but then filter it so only lines with '404' are actually displayed (the grep command does the filtering). Quick way to get your 404 errors. Or better yet, pump it out to a file:

cat yourlogfile.txt|grep 404>404errors.txt

which would create a file called 404errors.txt which contains only the 404 errors from your logfile. Pretty cool thing to do in one command line huh?

tail file.txt - that command prints the last ten lines of file.txt. Handy when viewing log files - you get the last 10 lines. Or even better use the -f option:
tail -f file.txt
which will dump the end of the file out to the screen on an ongoing basis, kind of a 'realtime' view. if you do this with logfiles you can watch exactly what's going on in the files as it's happening.

and so on . It's flexibility like this that causes perfectly normal people to turn into raving linux lunatics.

 

I would be completely lost as an admin without shell.

Using the -rf parameter for rm will skip the prompt and delete recursively (sub-folders and files). E.g.

rm -rf mydirectory

Code (markup):

That said, be careful with rm -rf! It'll delete whatever you tell it to, no questions asked, and delete the server right out from under you if you tell it to!

 

If you're EVER going to use rm -Rf, you better make sure you always have very good, complete, and current backups. In the last 7 years I have deleted directory branches at least twice just because I was flipping back and forth between terminal sessions and ended up in the wrong directory. (with my backup procedures i was 2 minutes away from a quick restore, but without that I'd have been very screwed).

 

I use nano su.txt if possible or cat su.txt. to remove it use rm -rf ./su.txt the ./ is important or you could break the server.

If you need nano you can install it with yum install nano -y

 

Else you can use Linux command and it would help you to navigate easily.