On Wed, 2010-01-13 at 11:56 -0500, Christian Langer wrote: > 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! Obviously, since that's what you told it to do. If you wanted to send the music file to another process, you'd need to use a pipe: "cat song.mp3 | vlc", or even "vlc < song.mp3". Of course that wouldn't work either since AFAIK vlc doesn't accept media files on its standard input, but the principle is correct. The elephant in the room is that you must have done this as *root*, or the Shell would have refused to overwrite /usr/bin/vlc. That's a highly insecure practice (as you've now discovered). Never do anything as root that doesn't absolutly require it. As to why vlc no longer works, a diagnosis would depend on the exact commands you used to remove and reinstall it (e.g. it's worrying that you say "I erased it, and removed it via yum" as if these were two distinct actions), but you might get away with simply issuing "yum reinstall vlc vlc-core". poc -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines