There is a great deal of documentation available on UNIX. Most of it, however, is rather cryptic, and you will find that it takes quite some time to understand it.
To obtain help on a command, use the on-line UNIX manual, e.g.,
man ls
will give you information on the ls command (if you have an Xterminal, use xman instead--see below). A useful option is -k (the k stands for ``keyword''), for example,
man -k print
will give you a list of all the commands that man knows about whose one-line descriptions contain the word ``print''. The command man -k is aliased to the command apropos, so you can type
apropos print
as well, if you think it is any easier.
Sometimes you will find that you can't find help on a given topic which you think should be available. This may mean that the command is part of the shell, in which case it may be described by using man csh, or man tcsh.
See man man for more information on using the on-line manual pages.
If you are using an Xterminal you can use
xman&
to examine the man pages in a faster, more convenient, form than by using man itself. You can also access over 200 MBytes of books about programming through dxbook,
dxbook&
This latter command is particularly recommended.
Try
learn
to try some on-line tutorials (use control-C to abort them if you have had enough). Note, however, that the on-line tutorials are not particularly useful (the ones on ``files'', ``morefiles'', and ``C'' are probably the best).
vilearn can be used to learn about the editor vi. emacs has an inbuilt tutorial accessed with C-h t.
There is an out-of-date set of ULTRIX 3.0 manuals in the Dept. of Astrophysics available for perusal. Due to the cost we won't be purchasing additional manual sets, but instead will be relying on the on-line documentation accessable through dxbook. Manuals for the HP LaserJet III and other peripherals, as well as locally added software such as IRAF, are available by asking Michael Ashley.