Since no one else seems to have bothered with this I thought I'd post my answers. Of course this is just a shameless attempt to show off how fat my head is... ;)
No. Noone else posted it to the list because Perry specifically asked people not to post their answers to the list :)
Google, manpages and any other reference source is encouraged.
* Why has the writing been worn off my tab key? what am I using it for?
Tab completion & code indentation.
Jumping to the next field in web forms :-P
init has pid 1 because it is the first process to be spawned by the kernel. It is the parent of all other processes. MostLinux systems run SysVinit which configured via /etc/inittab. If it was to die? The kernel would probably halt or reboot the system.
Probably? It generates a quite impressive kernel panic!
Killall kills all processes with a particular name. Killall5 does the same but will not kill the processes in its own session. Very useful for shutdown scripts.
Err no, killall5 kills all processes on the box regardless of whatever name parameter you pass it. At least that's what we discovered when trying to killall on a slowaris box..
* If I had permissions "rwxr-xr-x perry fooers" who could do what? What type of file is this likely to be? What about if the permissions are 550?
'fooers' as a group suggests people who are allowed to configure or control foo. My impression is that this is a config file or directory and foo is a daemon (food :)
* I have a file with a charactor I can't type in it, how would I delete it from the cli?
You mean a filename with something strange in it. Just use a wildcard. Eg:
rm ./start*end
Or if it is a single character use:
rm ./start?end
We once spent an entertaining amount of time discussing the safest way to remove a file owned by root, in the / directory, named " -rf" I'd love to see what the list suggests for this :)
* what's /dev/ttyS0 likely to be? I sent "AT\n" to it, and it said something back that made me happy, what did it say?
A modem. It should say OK back and you would be happy.
Bah, you guys are so boring ;) Router>AT Translating "AT"...domain server (202.37.245.20) % Unknown command or computer name, or unable to find computer address Router>
* How would I set up IP masquerading?
After last week's meeting the answer should surely be "Don't use NAT, configure IPV6 and get 65000+ routable addresses for use on your LAN"