Purpose and Conventions

The Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) compiled this document to provide a catalog of the less-publicized commands and capabilities of the Athena system for people who have learned the basics of Unix. If you are a complete newcomer to the system, we suggest that you begin with the Athena documents. These documents are available at Copy Tech in the basement of building 11 or the Student Center.

File names throughout this document are indicated in italics.

Program names, commands to be typed to the shell, and text that is returned by a command are in typewriter text.

Document names are in typewriter text.

Commands for GNU Emacs and other interactive programs are in boldface.

A C- prefix indicates Control character. For instance, C-x means that you hold down the Control key and hit the ``x'' key. A M- prefix indicates a Meta character, so for M-a you would hold down the ``Alt'' (or ``Compose Character'' on some keyboards) key and type ``a''.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask us by coming to the SIPB office (W20-575), emailing us (sipb@mit.edu), calling us (253-7788) or zephyring us (class ``sipb'', instance ``iathena'').

Luke Faraone 2012-01-11