# IRC Collaborative Debugging

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For requesting help from an IRC help channel (like #archlinux), you can use collaborative debugging services (like pastebin) to give IRC users details about problems you are seeing or configuration files you need referenced.

## IRC Usage

When you tell the people in the chat-room what your problem is, sometimes they will need to know additional information. This could be the output (for example) of a command or the contents of a configuration file. It is a general rule for IRC channels to never paste text greater than three lines. When you need to do more, paste services (e.g. pastebin) allow temporary use of storing text information. To prevent from having to write the information down physically and then type it manually into an IRC channel this is where it becomes useful to use collaborative debugging program that can send the information to a paste service. There are several tools that can be used that can send information to a pastebin service.

Note: If you are in console and using and IRC program you can do Ctrl+Alt+F2 (F3, F4…) to enter another console to enter a command.

## Output Errors/Messages to File

Many of these programs will need to have a file to upload. If you are using a program that you need to share it's output you can put it in a text file by doing:

    program > program-output.txt 2>&1

For example:

    fdisk -l > partitions.txt 2>&1

It will redirect all output to a text file (both standard output and standard error output) and can be uploaded to a pastebin service.

## Console Installer Questions

Occasionally you might need to actually show a picture of what your question is about (e.g. if you have a question about a console-based installer). For this you can use fbshot. fbshot is a framebuffer screenshot program. To take a screenshot of the first console (Ctrl+Alt+F1):

    fbshot -c 1 console1.png

Then you can use links and a image-hosting website to upload the image.

Category:

- Internet Relay Chat

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