ROHAN Academic Computing

3.0 Finding Help

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.

3.1 The man pages
3.2 The help command
3.3 Reporting Problems/Asking Questions

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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:

1. Commands
   
2. System calls
   
3. 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.

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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.

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3.3 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 or printer usage, visit the Student Computing Center in LL-200. For network problems, visit the ETS Help Desk in LL-200.

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4.0 Available Software

A list of available ROHAN software can be found on the web, see ROHAN Software.

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