# For People New to Both FreeBSD and UNIX®

### Annelise Anderson

`<andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu>`

$FreeBSD: release/8.4.0/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/new-users/article.xml 39632 2012-10-01 11:56:00Z gabor $

August 15, 1997

Legal Notice

Congratulations on installing FreeBSD! This introduction is for people new to both FreeBSD and UNIX®—so it starts with basics. It assumes you are using version 2.0.5 or later of FreeBSD as distributed by FreeBSD.org, your system (for now) has a single user (you)—and you are probably pretty good with DOS/Windows® or OS/2®.

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# 1 Logging in and Getting Out

Log in (when you see `login:`) as a user you created during installation or as `root`. (Your FreeBSD installation will already have an account for `root`; who can go anywhere and do anything, including deleting essential files, so be careful!) The symbols `%` and `#` in the following stand for the prompt (yours may be different), with `%` indicating an ordinary user and `#` indicating `root`.

To log out (and get a new `login:` prompt) type

    # exit

as often as necessary. Yes, press enter after commands, and remember that UNIX is case-sensitive—`exit`, not `EXIT`.

To shut down the machine type

    # /sbin/shutdown -h now

Or to reboot type

    # /sbin/shutdown -r now

or

    # /sbin/reboot

You can also reboot with Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Give it a little time to do its work. This is equivalent to `/sbin/reboot` in recent releases of FreeBSD and is much, much better than hitting the reset button. You do not want to have to reinstall this thing, do you?

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