
In this case, however, there are a couple of ways for you to decide whether the program is safe without having to trust me. In general, no, it's not safe and I don't encourage it.

You should be wondering whether you can believe me, and whether it's safe to run a program at the behest of a stranger. If you prefer, you can act on it yourself without disclosing the contents to me or anyone else. That report goes nowhere unless you choose to share it. All it does is to generate a human-readable report on the state of the computer. It doesn't send or receive any data on the network.

Below are instructions to run a UNIX shell script, a type of program. There are ways to back up a computer that isn't fully functional. Backup is always a must, and when you're having any kind of trouble with the computer, you may be at higher than usual risk of losing data, whether you follow these instructions or not. The backup is necessary on general principle, not because of anything in the test procedure. If you don't already have a current backup, back up all data before doing anything else.

You do harder tasks with the computer all the time.Ģ. The process is much less complicated than the description. But with the aid of the test results, the solution may take a few minutes, instead of hours or days.ĭon't be put off by the complexity of these instructions. It changes nothing, for better or worse, and therefore will not, in itself, solve the problem.
