text editors

[rasputinnovgorod]

Hi guys:

I have a SUSE router at home; and I have a friend who knows about
linux who helps me; but won't RTFM.

A couple of days ago, I used gEdit in root to edit "named.conf" and
a couple of the zone files. The effort fixed a problem I was having,
and everything seemed to be working fine.

But when my fiend found out, he said I'd screwed up those file permissions
and filled the plain text with gibberish, ~by~ using gEdit. He said
I can only use an editor like PICO, which won't change file
permissions or imbed non-ascii code into the file.

So I tried PICO. IS he for real or is he just having fun with me? I haven't
used such a primitive editor in 30 years, since Fortran days. Will an editor
change file permissions? I haven't seen an editor that used <CTL>
command sequences since my CP/M 8 bit days...

Now I know word processors will imbed special formating characters
that will choke a simple ASCII parser, but gEdit seemed like a very
simple plain-text editor.

Sincerely
/blair

[gogalthorp]

LOL

No

You can always check edit a file and look at the permissions before and after.

ls - l will show the file permissions

You do not want to use a Word processor but a text editor of any kind is fine.

[D-cat]

Yes. Pico/nano, vi, emacs, joe, mcedit... all good for text mode. In the gui, gedit, leafpad, kwrite/kate, emacs gui, editra... all acceptable text editors for system files.

What you do NOT want to use are things like AbiWord, Office Writer, Pathetic Writer, and other editors that use word processing features (text styling).

While it's not impossible for any program to edit the permissions of a file you already have write access to/ownership of, I've never had a problem with any editor altering permissions on me, they've always saved with the same permissions the file was opened with.

Like GT said though, it's not something hard to check and fix.