On Wed, 2010-01-13 at 11:56 -0500, Christian Langer wrote: > > > > ______________________________________________________________________ > Hi, I seem to have lost vlc. It was working ok til I tried the > following from http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/iodirection.html. > > "Like I told you before, files aren't the only places where you can > redirect the standard output. You can redirect it to devices, too: > $ cat sound.wav > /dev/audio > > As you saw, in the above example the cat command concatenates a file > named sound.wav and the results are sent to a device > called /dev/audio. What's the fun here, then? /dev/audio is the audio > device, and when you send there the contents of a sound file, that > file is played. So if your sound is properly configured, the above > command plays the file sound.wav!" > > I thought that if I sent a music file to vlc in this way, vlc would > play it. So I did cat song.mp3 > /usr/bin/vlc. At this point vlc > stopped working. I looked in /usr/bin and found that vlc had been > turned into a music file! So I erased it, and removed it via yum. > Success. Then I reinstalled via yum; success. But the messages now > are: from terminal: > > [chris@localhost bin]$ vlc > bash: vlc: command not found > > >From gui: Could not launch 'VLC media player' Failed to execute child > process "vlc" (No such file or directory). > > Any help? Thanks, > > Chris Simple: /dev/snd/* and /dev/dsp are device nodes - read special "files" that are used to communicate with the kernel. However, /usr/bin/vlc is binary. As such, while cat file.wav > /dev/audio send a wav stream to be played by a kernel driver, cat file.mp3 > /usr/bin/vlc trashed the vlc binary. On more thing, in-order to trash the vlc binary you had to run as root. I'd advise against using the root account to anything besides administration tasks. - Gilboa -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines