Duke University
Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development

Computing & Statistics Lab

I. On-Line Help - Your first stop on the problem solving bus

     The UNIX man pages -
     The man command displays  information  from  the  reference
manuals; hence, the name 'man'. 'man command' will give you help on
whatever command you specify. 'man man' will help you to use the man
command itself. But what if you do not know what command you need help
on? In that case, use 'man -k keyword' where keyword is a word that has
something to do with what you want to accomplish. Look through the output
to focus in on what is the most likely looking command.

     AnswerBook -
     The Sun Solaris AnswerBook is a web browser interface to the man
pages. You can find it at http://docs.sun.com/. It's main advantage over
the man pages is that you can get a listing of all the UNIX commands with
brief descriptions of each that command does. This combined with searching
on keywords will help get you the information you need.

     Program Specific Help -
     Some programs offer specific help once you are running them. For
example, the text editor pico shows lines such as the following all of the
time that you are using it. These lines prompt you with the correct key
strokes for certain functions, one of which is to get more help.

^G Get Help  ^O WriteOut  ^R Read File ^Y Prev Pg   ^K Cut Text  ^C Cur Pos   
^X Exit      ^J Justify   ^W Where is  ^V Next Pg   ^U UnCut Text^T To Spell  

     Many commands will give you help or a usage screen if you specify a
parameter such as -h or a question mark or if you use the command
improperly. For example:

irv@rubin> cat -x
cat: illegal option -- x
usage: cat [ -usvtebn ] [-|file] ...

     One of the best ways to keep up with how you have solved your
computer problems is to type up what worked and save it to a file. Create
a 'howto' subdirectory and store all of these files there. Over time you
will create a pretty good database of procedures for solving problems you
have had and for getting hints on solving new problems. Use the commands
'ls', 'less' and 'grep' to search these files for the information you
need when you need it.