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ptwobrussell / Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Edition

The official online compendium for Mining the Social Web, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2013)
http://bit.ly/135dHfs
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Cannot find directory #116

Closed iancero closed 10 years ago

iancero commented 10 years ago

Hello and thanks in advance for your help!

I am following the instructions on the screen-cast for installing the virtual machine. VirtualBox, Git, and Vagrant are all installed already.

The git clone command worked fine, but when I type "cd Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Edition" into my command prompt, I get an error message reading "the system cannot find the path specified." I have tried just moving on to the next step, but that doesn't work. When I go back to the previous step, the error reads "fatal:destination path already exists and is not an empty directory." The directory exists, but I cannot seem to get to it. Do you know what I am missing?

I am using Windows 8.

ptwobrussell commented 10 years ago

Hi - Thanks for reaching out for help. I'll do all that I can to help you sort through this.

From your description, it appears that you are just having some problems working on the command line, so the good news is that we should be able to sort this out pretty quickly/easily. A few things.

Can you share with me a screenshot of the command prompt that shows the output of your "git clone" command that you believe completed successfully?

The result of "git clone" should have created a directory that's named Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Edition. Can you type "dir" into the same directory that you ran your original "git clone" from and share with me its output? A screenshot would be fine for this as well.

All that "cd" does is "change directory" into wherever you tell it. In your case, you're telling it to change directories to the Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Edition directory that should be there if your "git clone" really completed as expected.

Can you get back to me and let me know about these things?

PS - If you're curious to learn more about working with a command line interface like the Windows Command Prompt, you can search for a tutorial on it. It's a skill worth picking up. One that I've recommended in the past is this one from quite some time ago - http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/windows-command-prompt-introduction/

ptwobrussell commented 10 years ago

Just wanted to ping you again on this to see if you'd made any progress or if I can do anything to help at this point?

ptwobrussell commented 10 years ago

@iancero - I haven't heard anything back, so I'm going to go ahead and close this issue, but please feel free to reopen it or open any other issues if you need any help. Glad to do whatever I can to help you be successful with your project.

iancero commented 10 years ago

Hello,

Let me begin by apologizing for taking so long to get back to this, I think the post-holiday catch-up work really got away from me this year. I really appreciate your speedy response and I am sorry for failing to reciprocate.

That said, I did find your explanation of what is happening on the command line really helpful. In fact, once I knew what "cd" was actually doing (thanks for that!), I think I found a relatively parsimonious solution to my problem. For future readers, I'll describe what I did below:

Following along on your video instructions, it appeared that "git clone" successfully created the folder it needed to create; my output matched yours in the video. As you indicated, the issue was that I was no longer in the right directory for the next step of the installation process (I don't know why, but that seems like what was going on). So, I opened the Windows search function and searched for "Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Edition," which ended up being buried in "C:\Users\John Smith\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Windows\SysWOW64\Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Edition". Once I entered "cd C:\Users\John Smith\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Windows\SysWOW64\Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Edition" into the command line, I was able to proceed to the next step of the video with no problems and everything worked thereafter.

Thanks again for your help and I am excited to work through your book. So far, it is shaping up to be a key element in my dissertation.

Ian

PS - thanks also for the command line tutorial, I've been needing one of those for a long time.

ptwobrussell commented 10 years ago

Excellent, I'm so glad to hear it!

I'm here for you if there's ever anything else I can do to help you. Just let me know...