intro(1)
intro --
introduction to commands and application programs
Description
This section describes, in alphabetical order, commands, including
user commands, programming commands and
administrative commands.
There are several instances of
multiple manual pages with the same name.
For example, there are several manual pages called
mount(1M).
In each such case the first of the multiple
pages describes the syntax and options of the
generic command, that is, those options applicable
to all FSTypes (file system types).
The succeeding pages describe the functionality
of the FSType-specific modules of the command.
These pages all display the name of the FSType
to which they pertain as a suffix to the section number
in the command name.
You should not attempt to
call these modules directly--the generic command provides a common interface
to all of them.
Thus the FSType-specific manual pages should not be viewed
as describing distinct commands, but rather as
detailing those aspects of a command
that are specific to a particular FSType.
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:
name [-option ... ] [cmdarg ... ]
The meaning of this notation is as follows:
[]-
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-
noargletter ...
or argletter
optarg[, ...]
(always preceded by a ``-'')
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, below).
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 commands.
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.
-
Command names (name above) must be between two and nine characters long.
-
Command names must include only lower-case letters and digits.
-
Option names (option above) must be one character long.
-
All options must be preceded by
``-''.
-
Options with no arguments may be grouped after a single
``-''.
-
The first
option-argument
(optarg
above)
following an option must be preceded by white space.
-
Option-arguments cannot be optional.
-
Groups of option-arguments following an option must either be separated by
commas, or separated by white space and quoted
(for example, -o xxx,z,yy or -o "xxx z yy").
-
All options must precede operands
(cmdarg
above)
on the command line.
-
``--''
may be used to indicate the end of the options.
-
The order of the options relative to one another should not matter.
-
The relative order of the operands (cmdarg above)
may affect their significance
in ways determined by the command with which they appear.
-
``-''
preceded and followed by white space should only be used to mean standard input.
Commands that handle large files
If you are working in a filesystem that supports
files larger than 2GB, a limited set of commands
have been updated to handle such large files.
See
``Managing large files'' in Monitoring and tuning the system
for the list of commands,
and
Intro(2)
for more information on large file support.
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 non-zero
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.
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
UnixWare 7 Release 7.1.4 - 25 April 2004