HELP

Section: Local Commands (L)
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NAME

help - a VMS-like help facility for XENIX

SYNOPSIS

help

DESCRIPTION

help is intended to be a more useful system than the native man(1) supplied with XENIX. It is styled after the very popular and useful VMS HELP facility, in that it is tree structured and interactive.

help is very configurable. In essence, you decide what help "topics" map to what files. I.E. you can have more than one topic, or acronym, map to the same help subtopic. An example would be having the words "lp" and "printing" both map to the help subtopic "lp-command". Also, you need not have the subtopic "lp" even show up in the help screen. If you wish to have acronyms, as described above, it is site taylorable using the DIRFILE (as described below in INTERNALS).

All of the files and directories contained in the system are all plain text files, with an easy format that can be used to your advantage.

INTERNALS

help uses a tree structured file data-base to store all help. Each node (or directory) has at least one file. This file, called ./TEXT contains the actual text of the help message for this subtopic. If there are any subtopics below this one, their ./TEXT files are held in subdirectories of this one, and then there is a file ./DIR that maps the directory name to the subtopic to display. This will allow SYSV systems with limited directory name lengths map much longer descriptions to shorter file names.

Also contained in the ./DIR file is a similar mapping for acronyms of the subsequent subtopics. In the example above with lp, a sample portion of a help file would be

       lp-command*lp

       lp-command:printing

       lp-command:getting output

Where the "*" in the first line implies that the "topic" name "lp" is to be printed as a possible topic for help, and the subtopics "printing" and "getting output" are acronyms for traversing the to the "lp-command" subdirectory to get at the next ./TEXT file.

FILES

"/usr/help/...."       - Root directory for help

"./TEXT"                       - Help text

"./DIR"                        - Directory files for next subtopic

DIAGNOSTICS

There are no real diagnostics. However, if you reach a point in the help system where you know you have a "subtopic" but cannot reach it, search for correct premissions (0444 for ./TEXT files, and (0555 for ./DIR files).

AUTHOR

Roland J. Stolfa
Department of Computing and Information Sciences
Oklahoma State University

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 10:10:28 GMT, December 12, 2024