Online Documentation

There are a number of different sources of online information. The following sections outline some of the more important ones.

Web Resources

We have put together a modest collection of web pages to help you understand the peculiarities of our unix instalation. These pages are not intended to tell you everything about using Unix, but they may help get started and they will tell you the site-specific features of our systems. You can get to the top page of these resource by clicking on the Index button above.

Man Pages

Most unix systems come with a large collection of online documents called "man pages." The man is short for manual. There is a program called man that will let you read the man pages for different topics. For example, if you want to know about the awk command, just type:
  man awk
In fact, if you want to know how to use man itself (this is a good place to start if you have never used man before), you can just type:
  man man
While you are viewing a man page, you can use space (or enter) to move forward in the page and you can type b to move back. If you type a slash (/), it will search forward through the man page for whatever string you enter. Typing a question mark (?) will let you search backward.

There is a graphical version of man called xman. It lets you see all of the topics in each section of the online manual and lets you scroll through each page with a scrollbar. Xman can come in handy if you need to look at more than one man page at the same time.