1. About This Guide

This section describes the purpose of this document, information on sources and methods used in its production, conventions used in the text, and how to lay your hands (or eyes) on the current version.

1.1. Goals

This guide introduces you to the academic Unix systems at the University of New Hampshire, describes the policies governing their use, and offers a brief overview of some of the resources available to Unix users at UNH.

This document is not intended to be a general tutorial on Unix, or computers in general; such material would needlessly duplicate information that's already relatively easily available. (See Section 12, “Additional Unix Information Sources” in this document for some sources of such information.)

Given the fact that computing technology develops rapidly, this document will be revised as Computing and Information Services (CIS) upgrades the Unix systems and adds new features.

1.2. Acknowledgments

This document was improved immeasurably by 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, and Jean Smith. (Sorry, did I forget you? Send me mail and remind me!)

In Section 6.2, “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).

Our brief description of the World Wide Web in Section 10.1, “World Wide Web” was lightly adapted from the Imaginary Landscape HelpWeb tutorial guide.

This document was written entirely on the CIS Unix systems using the vi editor, coded in eXtensible Markup Language (XML) according to the DocBook Document Type Definition (DTD) and processed with the DocBook Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) style sheets.

Whew. In English, that means that a single plaintext input file was used to produce both Web and printable versions of this document. This is good stuff. You can learn more about XML at the URL http://www.xml.com. DocBook has its own website at http://www.docbook.org/. A great introduction to using DocBook and XSL is Bob Stayton's DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide.

1.3. 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.


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.

1.4. Availability

Without getting bogged down in legalisms (which I probably wouldn't get right anyway), this document is freely available. The XML source files are kept in the directory ~pas/doc/cisug/, accessible from any CIS Unix system. Do with them what you will.

You can access the formatted versions of this document on the CIS Unix systems in the directory /home/notes/cisug/ and (of course) served up on the web at http://pubpages.unh.edu/notes/cisug/.