NAME

intro − introduction to commands and application programs

DESCRIPTION

This section describes, in alphabetical order, commands (including system maintenance commands) available for your computer.  The commands in this section should be used along with those listed in Sections 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 of the INTERACTIVE SDS Guide and Programmer’s Reference Manual.  References of the form name(1), name(2), name(2P), name(3), name(3P), name(4), name(5), and name(5P) refer to entries in that manual.  References of the form name(1), name(1M), name(1C), name(1G), name(1P), name(5), name(5P), name(7), and name(8) refer to entries in this manual. Entries of the form name(nP) refer to POSIX entries, which pertain to the operating system environment specified by U.S. Government standard IEEE Std. 1003.1-1988. 

Manual Page Command Syntax

Unless otherwise noted, commands described in the SYNOPSIS section of a manual page accept options and other arguments according to the following syntax and should be interpreted as explained below. 

name [−option...] [cmdarg...]
where:

[ ] Surround an option or cmdarg that is not required. 

...  Indicates multiple occurrences of the option or cmdarg.

name The name of an executable file. 

option (Always preceded by a “−”.) 
noargletter... or,
argletter optarg[,...]

noargletter A single letter representing an option without an option-argument.  Note that more than one noargletter option can be grouped after one “−” (Rule 5 in the following text). 

argletter A single letter representing an option requiring an option-argument. 

optarg An option-argument (character string) satisfying a preceding argletter. Note that groups of optargs following an argletter must be separated by commas or separated by white space and quoted (Rule 8 below). 

cmdarg Path name (or other command argument) not beginning with “−”, or “−” by itself indicating the standard input. 

Command Syntax Standard:  Rules

These command syntax rules are not followed by all current commands, but all new commands use them.  getopts(1) should be used by all shell procedures to parse positional parameters and to check for legal options. It supports Rules 3-10 below. The enforcement of the other rules must be done by the command itself.

1.  Command names (name above) must be between two and nine characters long. 

2.  Command names must include only lowercase letters and digits. 

3.  Option names (option above) must be one character long. 

4.  All options must be preceded by “−”. 

5.  Options with no arguments may be grouped after a single “−”. 

6.  The first option-argument (optarg above) following an option must be preceded by white space. 

7.  Option-arguments cannot be optional. 

8.  Groups of option-arguments following an option must either be separated by commas or separated by white space and quoted (e.g., −o xxx,z,yy or −o "xxx z yy"). 

9.  All options must precede operands (cmdarg above) on the command line. 

10.  “−−” may be used to indicate the end of the options. 

11.  The order of the options relative to one another should not matter. 

12.  The relative order of the operands (cmdarg above) may affect their significance in ways determined by the command with which they appear. 

13.  “−” preceded and followed by white space should only be used to mean standard input. 

SEE ALSO

getopts(1). 
exit(2), wait(2), getopt(3C) in the INTER­ACTIVE SDS Guide and Programmer’s Reference Manual.  How to Get Started at the front of this document. 

DIAGNOSTICS

Upon termination each command returns two bytes of status, one supplied by the system and giving the cause for termination and (in the case of “normal” termination) one supplied by the program (see wait(2) and exit(2)). The former byte is 0 for normal termination; the latter is customarily 0 for successful execution and nonzero to indicate troubles such as erroneous parameters or bad or inaccessible data. It is called variously “exit code,” “exit status,” or “return code” and is described only where special conventions are involved.

BUGS

Regrettably, not all commands adhere to the aforementioned syntax. 

WARNINGS

Some commands produce unexpected results when processing files containing null characters.  These commands often treat text input lines as strings and therefore become confused upon encountering a null character (the string terminator) within a line. 

ADDED VALUE

This entry, supplied by INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation, contains enhancements to UNIX System V. 

\*U  —  Version 1.0