I broke Smaugfuss but its something REALLY simple

OK, here's what I did, I HAD a fully working Smaugfuss 1.8 (latest version as of today) and it was fine.

I edited the help.are file to change the startup logo, then saved it. Nothing changed so figured Smaugfuss needed a restart which I (probably stupidly) did by kill the processes by ID using ps -ef

Now it won't come backup. When I do a ./startup 4000 & it appears ok but doesn't let me login - connection refused.

When I do ./smaug 4000 it gives me an error:

Reading in area files...
area.lst: No such file or directory

area.lst is present, but when I look at it, the first file is help.are, the very one I edited.

So what could I have done to mess it up, it must be something silly.

Smee

It appears that my ascii logo has a tilde ~ in it which I gather is start and end point for help.are

Works fine i removed it. There was only one.

Can I have a tilde in the logo or is it just a no no with the way this works?

You can't use a tilde in helpfiles because it represents the end of the helpfile. You probably should be using the in-game buffer to edit helpfiles, then you wouldn't have had this problem (it converts ~ to -).