Getting Help

Documentation

The main source of documenation on a UNIX workstation are man pages. If you want help on a particular command, use the man command. For example,

   man cp

will give you the manual for the cp command. These man pages also exists for C programming functions and many times the name of a command is also the name of programming function. To make sure you only get the manual for the program invoked from the command line, use the "-s 1" option. This tells man to only look in section 1 of the manual database which contains program run from the shell prompt. For example,

   man -s 1 passwd

If you are searching for a command in UNIX that is related to some "thing", you can use the apropos command to see if one exists. Say you are trying to find a command that lets you change your, then try

   apropos password

Suddenly several lines listing commands and program functions related to passwords fly by. To narrow it down about, using piping with the grep command. For instance,

   apropos password | grep 1

lists all entries in the manual database with password in their short description and also the character 1 in the short description (in this case we are trying to pick out only section 1 entries). The results of the above command on physics is

grpck           pwck (1m)       - password/group file checkers
nispasswd       nispasswd (1)   - change NIS+ password information
nispasswdd      rpc.nispasswdd (1m) - NIS+ password update daemon
passmgmt        passmgmt (1m)   - password files management
passwd          passwd (1)      - change login password and password attributes
pwck            pwck (1m)       - password/group file checkers
rpc.nispasswdd  rpc.nispasswdd (1m) - NIS+ password update daemon
vipw            vipw (1b)       - edit the password file
yppasswd        yppasswd (1)    - change your network password in the NIS database
xlock           xlock (1)       - locks the local X display until a password isentered

From this, you can see that it is the passwd command that you want, so you can do a "man -s 1 passwd" to look at its documenation.

Asking Questions

If you need help that these web pages don't answer or using man or apropos doesn't help, then send email to help@physics.wm.edu with your question. Several knowledgable users, including the system administrator, will get mail sent to that address and may be able to help you.

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Last modified 9/12/96
College of William and Mary, Dept. of Physics

raines@physics.wm.edu