# Real Newbie question - sorry



## spottedh (Apr 17, 2012)

Hi all

I have just begun learning about FreeBSD, I am from a windows environment (though I was also supporting Dos many moons ago).  I am getting there, having been playing with FreeBSD 9 on a VMware box for a few weeks, so I am sorry in advance for the newbie question.

I need to create a folder and make that new folder the root.  I have looked everywhere and have so far not been able to find anything that simply explains what I need to do to achieve this.

Any help would be great (maybe a newbie posts group would be good for me!) :stud


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## _martin (Apr 17, 2012)

Well Hi and welcome. 

Actually MS-DOS and FreeBSD use the same command to create directory - mkdir(1). I'm not sure what you mean by _"make that new folder the root"_.

If you're getting familiar with UX-like OS, I suggest you to go through some tutorial for beginners, something like this UNIX tutorial. Also FreeBSD's handbook is a good start. 

Many more documentation can be found here on forums. And, as usual, even more can be found via Google.


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## spottedh (Apr 17, 2012)

Thanks matoatlantis

I am ok with the common comman*d*s, cp, ls, mkdir, and am basically working through a kind of tutorial using pfSense, but part of it says, create a directory to hold the root file system and point "newdir" to it, but no matter what search *I* Google I find nothing that explains how to achieve such a thing.

I*'*m using root at present simply because if I screw anything up I can do a fresh VMware build in minutes.


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## wblock@ (Apr 17, 2012)

Without context, it's hard to say.  Might be that "newdir" is a variable.


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## DutchDaemon (Apr 18, 2012)

pfSense and FreeBSD are not exactly the same, so either use FreeBSD documentation for FreeBSD or use pfSense documentation for pfSense. Mixing the two will hurt you.


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## spottedh (Apr 18, 2012)

*O*k well not using pfsense now, am looking at M0n0wall instead. I have got so far down the basic instructions, learning a lot, which is good. This is what it said.


> The following steps assume that your M0n0wall root file system will be built in $MWROOT, so create a directory to hold the root file system and set MWROOT to point to it.



Created the directory but cannot find anything that says how to do this.


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## fluca1978 (Apr 18, 2012)

spottedh said:
			
		

> ok well not using pfsense now, am looking at M0n0wall instead.
> 
> I have got so far down the basic instructions, learning alot, which is good.
> 
> ...



The statement comes from the documentation, and at glance it seems a way to build the monowall on a flash card or USB disk. What the documentation is telling you is that in the shown piece of code you should either substitute MWROOT with the full name of the directory you created or you should set a variable like the following:

```
setenv MWROOT /path/to/folder
```
and execute the shown code as it is.


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## spottedh (Apr 25, 2012)

*O*k, I got to the bottom of this, le*a*rned a load more at the same time, so am all good on this aspect now.

Thanks all for patience and help.


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