Did I break my Mac when I got the following error in Terminal?

Dave's Answer: Take a deep breath. Exhale.

You are safe in experimenting with the Terminal as long as you avoid a few powerful commands (which is no different from experimenting within the Finder as long as you avoid "Move File to Trash" and similar). I'd suggest that you start by learning how the following commands work together:

In terms of the ping command, that's one that varies a wee bit from different varieties of Unix. Nothing to panic about, but whenever you have a question about the usage of a command, you should use the "man" command to learn what the command really wants:

man ping

That would reveal that the version of ping included with Panther supports the -f flag, but that there's no -1 flag available. Perhaps that was intended to be a -l flag (lower case L) instead? The man page reveals:

     -l preload
             If preload is specified, ping sends that many packets as fast
             as possible before falling into its normal mode of behavior.

So that might well be what the Web site you were reading suggests.

I hope this is all helpful. You might be interested to know that I'm busy revising Learning Unix for Mac OS X for Tiger when it's released and as part of that will be adding more hands-on practice in the slim volume. (which isn't to say that the current edition isn't useful too! You can learn more about it at http://www.intuitive.com/macosx/ if you'd like)

Please, do feel free to explore the Terminal. It's a very powerful secret advantage that us Mac people have over the users of The Other Operating System. :-)

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