On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 7:58 AM, Rowan <rowa...@googlemail.com> wrote:

It's one line.

"sed" is a command in Unix/Linux which substitutes one string for another. In a shell if you do "cmd > file" it takes the output from the command and writes it to the file specified.

So, the instructions are thus :-

1. mv /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.bak

"mv" is the shell equivilant of the DOS "ren", it renames the file. So we take the file blacklist and rename it to blacklist.bak

2. sed 's/blacklist r8169/#blacklist r8169/' /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.bak > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

our "sed" instruction is to replace the string "blacklist r8169" in the file with "#blacklist r8169" - in other words to comment out any lines that say that (# being the comment command), "s/string1/string2" being the sed command for substitution.

we're then going to output the results to the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist (ie. the same as the file we renamed in 1).

Hope that is helpful.

They could, of course, have simply given you the following instructions which would do the same thing...

--> edit the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and comment out using # any lines that say "blacklist r8169", then reboot. Be sure to back up the file before you start.

...but I guess that'd be too easy, eh?