From: thorongil@telenet.be.invalid   
      
   On Monday 10 June 2013 20:55, Its Dale conveyed the following to   
   alt.os.linux.mandriva...   
      
   > [Moe Trin wrote:]   
   >   
   >> What might be more useful is:   
   >>   
   >>   insert the drive   
   >>   issue command  "dmesg | tail -30"   
   >>   
   >> and see what turns up.   
   >   
   > Does this do any thing you wanted me to due   
      
   Here's a short UNIX 101 course for you on the subject.  I'll try to be   
   as concise as I can. ;-)   
      
     1. The kernel maintains a ring buffer for its messages.  A ring buffer   
        is a FIFO "first in, first out" buffer, so anything added to the   
        end of the buffer will cause an equal amount of information to be   
        discarded from the beginning of the buffer.  /bin/dmesg produces   
        the entire ring buffer from beginning to end as output.  Its size   
        is defined at kernel compilation time.  I believe that it's 16 KiB   
        for x86-32 and 32 KiB for x86-64, but don't pin me down on the   
        numbers. ;-)   
      
     2. It is often said that "In UNIX, everything is a file".  More   
        correctly however would be to say that "In UNIX, everything is a   
        stream of bytes, but every stream of bytes is presented to the   
        user as a file."  /usr/bin/tail takes the last part of a stream   
        - the exact amount of data is what the user specifies on the   
        command line - as its stdin ("standard in") and then sends that to   
        its stdout ("standard out").   
      
     3. The above command as Moe Trin requested you to execute and as   
        left in quoted higher up - with attributions properly restored -   
        feeds the stdout of /bin/dmesg - which is the entire 16 or 32 KiB   
        from the kernel ring buffer - as input to /usr/bin/tail, which   
        then discards all but the last 30 lines of text from that stream   
        and sends those to your (pseudo-)terminal.  This is called a pipe.   
        The vertical bar ("|") denotes the piping of the first command's   
        stdout ("standard output") into the second command's stdin   
        ("standard input").   
      
   --   
   = Aragorn =   
     GNU/Linux user #223157 - http://www.linuxcounter.net   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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