Newbie Needing Help

[John or Judy Hixson]

At the risk of being told to get out of here and never come back (until you know enough to not need to come back), I need help on some very elementary stuff. I haven't found anywhere else to ask these questions and am therefore taking my chances.

I'm trying to learn some FreeBSD in anticipation of eventually admining a FBSD server for my church office network. I've installed FreeBSD 7.4 on an old PC and am trying to follow along while reading Michael Lucas' book (2nd ed.). Right now my problem is with the command line. Lucas make a statement as follows: "If you want to see a comprehensive list of loader variables, check the default configuration file." Since there is no command "check", I have no idea what to use. What command will "check" a file? What I really want to do is "view" the file, but that command doesn't exist either. Another problem that's throwing me for a loop is that even though I'm logged in as root I'm getting a "permission denied" return when I list a file (e.g. /etc/fstab) and press enter.

This no doubt the wrong place for simple questions like these so someone PLEASE tell me where better to go. Thank you.

John Hixson