Giving the help command will provide you with a one-screen “cheat sheet” of common Unix commands:

% help

The classic way to obtain Unix documentation online is via the man command. The syntax is:

man   command 

where command is the name of the command you need to find out about. Example:

% man ls

to find out about the ls command. You can also search the manual pages for specific keywords by using the -k option to man. For example, to see all the commands that might be relevant to “mail” try the command:

% man -k mail

In addition to the man command, an increasing number of program manuals are available through the info command. The info command allows sophisticated “hypertext”-like browsing of online manuals. To get started, simply type

% info

There is a built-in tutorial on using info in the program itself.

As Unix matures, more and more programs offer built-in documentation. Examples are the gnuplot graphing program, the lynx web browser, the pine mailer, and the pico editor.

Many programs include internal tutorials accessible while you are using them. Examples are the previously-mentioned info manual browser and the emacs editor.

Most of our “local” documentation is available over the WWW. The starting place is (naturally enough) the CIS Local Documentation page. For example, to view this page using lynx give the command:

% lynx http://pubpages.unh.edu/notes

The CIS Unix home page is a good source for recent announcements of upgrades, downtimes, and crosslinks to other useful pages.

CIS offers courses and videos in use of various computer systems. A monthly bulletin describes upcoming courses and the procedure for attending them; it is posted on many bulletin boards around campus. The Training web page has course schedules, video titles, and descriptions online; you can also register for courses on that page.

Good books on Unix are easy to find, and your best bet is to browse the bookstores, either the bricks-and-mortar variety or online. But (since we can), we'll recommend three favorites:

A wealth of Unix information is also available on the Web. One way to get started is to type “unix” as a search term at http://www.yahoo.com and start browsing. But here are three recommendations for somewhere to start: