FINDING INFORMATION

UNIX

Academic Computing and Networking Unix
Online manual pages in X-windows
Choose Help -> Man Pages from the root menu to start the manual page viewer. You can either search for commands by category, or by name.
Online manual pages from the command line
To see the manual pages for a command whose name you know, type 'man command name', eg. 'man lpr' to see the lpr manual pages.

If you want to find a command on a particular topic, type 'man -k keyword. For example, type 'man -k print' for a list of commands relating to printing.
Post a question to local.unix.help. Somebody on the system will probably know the answer.

BIRCH

Online help
Some interactive and X11 programs have online help, which will be available as a menu item. Also, a number of command-type programs will print a short help is -h is given as an option. For example,
```
readseq -h
```
will print a screenful of information listing the options of the program.
Manual pages
Many programs, in particular the FASTA programs, have online manual pages. type 'man program name' to read the manual page. For example:
```
man randseq
```
prints the manual page for randseq.
Documentation files
Documentation for most BIRCH programs is found in the $doc hierarchy. 'cd $doc' will put you into the $doc directory, which contains directories for each program package, or single documentation files for some programs. Documentation for most programs can also be viewed here.

GETTING HELP
BE SPECIFIC, GIVE EXAMPLES OR ERROR MESSAGES, READ THE HELP FIRST

	BIRCH (Molecular Biology) eg. GDE	Unix system and applications software
Questions eg. How do I ...?	Post a question to man.molbio. OR Contact the BIRCH administrator 474-6085, psgendb@cc.umanitoba.ca	ACN Support Desk
Problems eg. software crashes, bugs, can't print	Contact the BIRCH administrator 474-6085, psgendb@cc.umanitoba.ca	Send email, including error messages from your screen, to trouble@cc.umanitoba.ca or call the ACN Trouble Line 474-8484