On the Ubuntu forum I found “If you don’t know vi, use nano to edit the file:” and “Ctrl-X exits, and asks if you want to save.”

I did that, then scared myself because when I tried to view “host” again, using Terminal, I kept getting a blank window with [New File] (Oh, nevermind, I should have spelled it “hosts”….).

(What would you recommend as a good thing to read to learn Terminal?)

I’ve installed XAMPP on my Mac to install WordPress MU. I got up to the “successful installation” window that gave me a user id and pw and now I’m getting an Internal Server error.

I thought maybe the Hosts file was the issue… Any thoughts?

Thanks a million.

mc

If you are more comfortable editing with the GUI text editor in Mac OS X, TextEdit, you can modify the command to open up the hosts file using the following command:

sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit /etc/hosts

Once you edit it in that application, just use the menus to save or press Command + s to save.

Hope this helps.

I’m completely new to Terminal and scares the bejesus out of me.

I followed your instructions and those at Caxy.com and I thought I succeeded at editing my Hosts file.

But when I tried to save it, using “SHIFT + Z twice in vi” it didn’t do anything (I just got a sound alert) and I couldn’t tell if I was “in vi.”

Furthermore, when I terminated that window and opened a new shell to see if the changes took, they seemed to be there but Terminal was now telling me that I had a duplicate swap file of my hosts file and to proceed with caution.

Can you elaborate on how to make these edits correctly, how to make sure one’s made those changes, and how to make sure one has not created duplicate and or problematic copies of the host file, in this case?

Thank you!

*.domain.com A 10.0.0.1

Anyone know a simple way to do anything like this on OS X? I’d prefer to avoid installing a DNS sever.