Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!umich!yale!cs.utexas.edu!chinacat!chip
From: chip@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG (Chip Rosenthal)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: Finding Manuals
Message-ID: <883@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG>
Date: 13 Feb 90 23:11:24 GMT
References: <7147@netcom.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Unicom Systems Development, Austin (yay!)
Lines: 48

In article <7147@netcom.UUCP> jfh@netcom.UUCP (Jack Hamilton) writes:
>"RTFM" is sometimes appropriate, but what if you can't find the manual?
>I, for example, have an account on a timesharing system which runs Xenix.  

You might want to get a copy of O'Reilly & Associate's |Unix in a Nutshell|.
There are BSD and System V versions.  The System V version is pretty durn
near close to what you see on XENIX.  At my old job, the XENIX machine
was on the network, this is the book I'd have them use.  To give you some
of the depth available in this handy little book, here is the table of
contents:

    1)  UNIX Commands
    2)  Shell Syntax (Bourne Shell, C Shell, Bourne Shell vs. C Shell)
    3)  Pattern Matching (Metacharacters, Pattern Matching Examples)
    4)  Editor Command Summary (vi, ex, sed, awk)
    5)  Nroff and Troff (Requests, Escape Seqs, Number Regs, Spec Chars)
    6)  Macro Packages (mm, ms, me)
    7)  Preprocessors (tbl, eqn, pic)
    8)  Program Debugging (adb, sdb)
    9)  SCCS and Make (SCCS, Make)
    10) Error Messages

Obviously this little book isn't going to have the depth of TFM, but will
help you answer questions like, "What was that switch which printed in
multi-column output and played Yankee Doodle at the same time."  There are
obviously some of the issues translating between SysV and XENIX.  There
is some help, for example in the roff section it mentions which requests
are only available on ditroff (and therefore wouldn't be found in the
XENIX text processing system).

At under $20, it's a pretty good deal.

With this aside, it is still a poor idea to ask questions on the net just
because you don't have a manual handy.  You try to drive a car without
all four tires on, you get what you deserve.  You try to use a unix
system without documentation, same deal.

>I've looked at several bay area bookstores for it - Kepler's, Stacy's,
>Stanford University Bookstore (main branch and technical branch), Printers
>Inc, Clean Well Lighted Place for Books, even Crown - and there are lots
>of Unix books out there, but no Xenix manual.  

Err...have you contacted your XENIX salescritter?

-- 
Chip Rosenthal                            |  Yes, you're a happy man and you're
chip@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG                |  a lucky man, but are you a smart
Unicom Systems Development, 512-482-8260  |  man?  -David Bromberg