UNH IT: About CIS Unix Local Documentation

Acknowledgments

CIS Unix local documentation was improved immeasurably by contributions, advice, comments, and suggestions from innumerable people. Special thanks go to current and former CIS colleagues David Blezard, Jim Cerny, Carla Clarke, Bill Costa, Bruce Davies, Sharon Kampbell, Joe Kazura, Bob Kenney, Katie Ellis, and Jean Smith. (Sorry, did I forget you? Send me mail and remind me!)

In “Your Password”, we briefly discuss the safety issues involved in writing down your password; this discussion was adapted from Practical UNIX & Internet Security by Garfinkel and Spafford (O'Reilly, 3rd Edition, 2003).

The CIS Unix local documentation was written entirely on the CIS Unix systems using the vi editor. The documentation's style was adapted from the official UNH Information Technology look and feel.

Conventions

The following conventions are used in this document:

For concreteness, the examples used in this document will appear as if typed by a mythical user named Joseph O. Englebart, username joe. This means that you may see some differences when you try out the examples yourself; among other details, you should use (and expect to see) your own username instead of joe's.

In the text, some words will appear in different typestyles meant to indicate the kind of thing to which they refer; some examples are shown in Table 1, “In-Text Typographical Conventions”.

Table 1. In-Text Typographical Conventions

Object	Example
Username	`joe`
E-mail Address	`<joe@cisunix.unh.edu>`
Web Page (URL)	CIS Unix Home Page
File Name	`poli.c`
Directory Name	`/n/m/37/joe`
Keystrokes	Enter, Esc, or Ctrl+C
Unix Shell Command	showquota
Foreign Word or Phrase	status quo ante

Some sections describe Unix “shell” commands. Although it's possible for you to be a Unix user and never actually give a Unix shell command, it's occasionally useful and sometimes even necessary to do so. Simple shell command examples are formatted “screenlike” as so:
```
% showquota
Used 1.4M; Quota 256.0M
```
In this example, the normal Unix “prompt” character is a percent sign (%). It's typed by the computer; you shouldn't type it yourself. The command you typed was showquota (followed by pressing the Enter key, which isn't explicitly shown). The computer's output is shown on the following line.

Some examples attempt to describe legal command syntax. you should replace one or more words in the example with text appropriate to your situation. For example,
rm filename...

indicates that you should type one or more filenames on the same line following the rm command.

Some examples may have explanatory comments alongside; when at the keyboard you won't see these, and you shouldn't type them either. Example:

% menusteup           misspelled, should be “menusetup”
menusteup: Command not found.

The following icons are used to indicate information of varying degrees of importance:


	a note or aside;


	a tip or recommendation;


	an unusually important point;


	something you should be careful about doing;


	or something you should be extremely careful about doing.

The term “PC” in this document should be understood to include any “personal” computer, not just Intel/Microsoft-based platforms.

Page Maintenance:

Paul A. Sand <pas@unh.edu>

Last modified: 2012-05-07 3:55 PM EDT
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