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ROHAN has several
on-line help options: the man program, and the help
program from the rohan% prompt. The help program displays the ROHAN
Help files. All of these give information about programs, commands,
and other functions available in UNIX.
msgs, a public
bulletin board, is another on-line help option. Anyone, from their ROHAN
account, can post a question or send an answer to msgs by mailing
it to msgs@rohan.sdsu.edu. To read messages, type msgs at
the rohan% prompt.
- 3.1
The man pages
3.2 The help command
3.3 Reference Books
3.4 Reporting Problems/Asking Questions
3.1 The man pages
UNIX has fairly
complete documentation on-line. For each command or program there is supposed
to be a man page that describes it. To view these manual pages, use
the man command. For example, man ls shows
the man page describing the ls command.
The man pages are
not complete for substantial programs. The intent is to tell you how to
run things, but be short enough to view on your terminal. So man
pc will tell you how to run the Pascal compiler and list the
options. But it will not show the Pascal Reference Manual.
The manual pages
are organized into chapters (sections). It is sometimes useful to know
what the chapters mean. For example, apropos intro shows
there is documentation on intro in sections 1m, 2 and 3f and other sections.
If you were looking for a Fortran subroutine, you would want one in section
3f:
rohan% man
-s 3f intro
Here are some examples
of the chapters:
- Commands
- System calls
- Subroutines
The apropos
command is useful for finding a description when you know what something
is called. Suppose you don't know what a command name is. You can search
an index containing the titles of all man pages by the command apropos.
Generally the title lines are written so they contain keywords people would
use to look them up. The name of the Pascal compiler can be found by apropos
compiler.
Return to 3.0
Where to Find Help
3.2 The help command
ROHAN has a general
help menu. It tries to partially bridge the gap between the man pages and
the novice user. By typing help you will be shown a menu
of topics. These topics try to answer frequently asked questions and are
a good starting point if you're searching for information. See also the
ROHAN help files.
Return to 3.0
Where to Find Help
3.3 Reference Books
Some books you may
find useful are:
- A Practical
Guide to the UNIX System; 0-8053-7565-1; by Sobell; from Benjamin
& Cummings
- Learning
UNIX (with tutorial disks for a PC); 0-672-30457-0; by Gardner;
from SAMS
- Learning
the vi Editor; 1-565924-26-6; by Lamb; from O'Reilly &
Associates
- UNIX for
Dummies; 0-764541-47-1; by Levine & Young; from IDG Books
- UNIX in
a Nutshell (A Desktop Quick Ref. for SVR4 and Solaris 7);
1-56592-427-4; by & from O'Reilly & Associates
- UNIX on
Command; 1-56205-027-3; by Lewis; from New Rider Publishing
3.4 Reporting Problems/Asking
Questions
Questions or problems
relating to the operating system or software should be sent via Email
to problems@rohan.sdsu.edu. Questions regarding lab operations,
terminal or printer usage see the Lab Assistants in your SDSU computer
lab. For network problems and TACACS access call 594-5261 or visit the
TNS Help Desk in LL-200.
Return to 3.0
Where to Find Help
Return to Contents
The apropos
command (see section 3.1 The man pages) is
a good way to search the system to see if a software package is available.
Some of the software on ROHAN includes:
Category/Software
package
- compilers
- ada, c, c++, clisp,
f77 (Fortran), gcc,
g++, np (Nu Prolog), pc (Pascal), Tcl, Tk
- compression
- bzip2, compress,
gzip, unzip, zip, zoo
- databases
- oracle, MySQL
- debuggers
- adb, dbx,
ddd,
gdb, workshop**See NOTE below
- documentation
- answerbook, apropos,
help, man, tkman
- editors
- edt, emacs,
jove, pico, soffice (star office),
vi
- email
- mail, elm,
pine, mh,
exmh, POP3, mutt
- engineering
- ArcInfo
- image processing
- gimp, xgraph,
xpaint, xv
- internet
- ftp,
irc, lynx, mozilla, netscape, telnet,
tn3270
- modem
- kermit, sz/rz (zmodem)
- numerical libraries
- IMSL
- pagers
- less,
more, pg
- shells
- bash, sh, ksh,
csh, tcsh
- statistics
- bmdp,
sas, spss, spss-graph, vplx, xlispstat
- symbolic math
- maple,
matlab, octave
- text formatting
- tex, latex, divps,
nroff, ptroff, acroread
- text processing
- awk, nawk, perl,
grep, sed
- usenet
- nn, rn, trn, tin
- windows
- CDE, kde, Openlook,
Motif, X-windows, mwm, twm, fvwm
Also see ROHAN
Software for additional information.
Return to Contents
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system nor any of their employees, makes any warranty or assumes
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This page
last modified: August 29, 2005
Send comments/suggestions about this web page to webmaster@rohan.sdsu.edu
SDSU Faculty
and Students may send questions about software on ROHAN or ROHAN UNIX
problems to problems@rohan.sdsu.edu
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