More help

Departments of Mathematics & Statistics, University of South Carolina

Here are some last resort tips in case none of your friends, class-mates or instructors can help you. We have a limited number of handouts for graduate students and faculty on certain topics (like mathematical typesetting or editing), nevertheless it is always a good idea to buy few books dealing with UNIX in general. If you prefer the on-line browsing, this page describes how to use the xman program. You can even go one step further and search the net for some on-line information. There are a number of manuals, help sheets floating around about a variety of different topics.

Handouts

In case you want to be more familiar with one of the editors vi or emacs there are short help sheets available describing the predefined key bindings and what they do.
There are 1 or 2 pages long help sheets for UNIX commands, fortran, matlab and maple, and short manuals for latex, using pictures in latex, amsthesis, tib. There is even a table of frequently used tex symbols.
Come by room 415 to request one of these.

Books

A number of different UNIX books are available at booksellers. You can choose the one whose level is closest to your level of understanding UNIX, and price to the thickness of your wallet.
Some examples:

The xman manual browser

There is an extensive on-line help, that documents all the UNIX commands, the various system calls, and lots of things specific to the operating system. The two ways to access these documents is via the man or the xman command. The functionality of these programs is almost the same, but the latter has a very nice interface that makes it much more enjoyable to learn about UNIX that way. To start up xman use the built in menus (as described in the Menus section). What you will see is a small control box, that looks like this:

[xman]
The default size of this initial window is small, so that you can leave it running throughout your entire login session. The three options mean the obvious things: Help will pop up a window with on-line help, Quit will exit, and Manual Page will pop up a window with a manual page browser in it. You may pop up more than one manual page browser window from a single execution of xman.

The manual browser can be requested to split its screen into two, showing the available commands in the top part, and the documentation of the command in the bottom portion. This can be achieved by selecting Show Both Screens in the Options menu on the top right corner of the browser. By clicking on any command shown on the top, you can immediately read the short description of what that command does, what are the options used by that command, and possibly see some examples.
The help pages are grouped into at least eight sections by functionality. You can select any of these sections by using the Sections menu. The most frequently used section is the first, which comes up by default.
To find out what each section contains exactly, I would suggest reading the Intro man page of the appropriate section. That page tells you what type of help pages are in that section, lists many commands grouped in that section, and some of the intro pages even describe frequently used computer terms relevant to the commands of that section.

Finally here is a sample of how the browser looks like, when asked to explain what the cal command does.

[xman]