On Sun, 17 Aug 2008 18:46:33 +0200, "B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson"
<br.ederson@expires-2008-08-31.arcornews.de> wrote:

(...)
>
>> The only manual change needed was to move this line back to the top:
>> 127.0.0.1 localhost # this needs to be the first line for some reason
>>
>> I'm digging for the sort command that only sorts from the second line
>> down but haven't found it yet.
>
> The following command line should contain all commands in a one liner:
>
> sed "/127\.0\.0\.1/d" hosts | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' | sort -u | sed
> "1i127.0.0.1 localhost" > hosts
>

Bad idea. My guess of how the OP is using the hosts file is to set
the
IP address of known malicious sites as 127.0.0.1. You'd at least
want
to append your sed's search expression with '[:space:]*localhost'
before
deleting *ALL* lines that contain 127.0.0.1.

sort has a -f option, so the tr is not required.



(...)
> Although the above should work fine, it usually is better to create a
> hosts.new file first and rename it afterwards. But that's up to you.
>

That's actually excellent advice, so much that, that should have been
reflected in your command line. Had the OP used your above command
line,
he'd have lost all entries that corresponded to malicious web-sites
in
his hosts file.


> There are other ways to do the above. I settled with deleting lines
> containing the localhost (127.0.0.1) entries instead of just preserving
> the first line, because the merging of several hosts files may result in
> more than one localhost line...
>

I guess that explains your deleting lines containing 127.0.0.1, but
there
are a number of web sites out there (one even given in an else
thread)
that provide HOSTS files that redirect all requests to known
malicious
sites to 127.0.0.1.


> HTH.
> BeAr