In case you ever wondered what kind of software we have on Atlas or Artemis, and how to use it, here is how you find out more. The answer is to read the fine online documentation we have. There are basically two formats, man pages and info pages. You can go to any xterm and run the command xman &, which is a browser for man pages, and it gives you an index of any and all man pages. For the info pages just type info, or M-x info from within GNU Emacs. If you have never used info before, I suggest you read the info page for info, that is run the command info info.
If there is a specific program you need to know more about try man programname and info programname. If you just know parts of the command name or what it relates to, then you can use man -k. This searches the so-called whatis database for manpage headings containing your search string. For example, man -k ps will list any man pages having the string ps in its title.
You can also use the help command, which looks up a string in the index for the manual pages. For example,
atlas 30 % help tex
will give you a list of all manual pages whose titles
contain the string "tex"; you can then use the man
command to look in detail at the manual pages which you think you
might be interested in.
man gnu
and you get the answer
No reference page found for gnu.So you search the whatis database with
man -k gnu
and you get lucky, the system tells you the following list:
gemacs, emacs, xemacs (1) - GNU project Emacs GDBM (3) - The GNU database manager. Includes dbm and ndbm compatability. (Version \*(ve.) bash (1) - GNU Bourne\-Again SHell cccp, cpp (1) - The GNU C-Compatible Compiler Preprocessor. g++ (1) - GNU project C++ Compiler g77 (1) - GNU project F77 Compiler (v0.5.18) g77 (1) - GNU project F77 Compiler (v0.5.18) gcc, g++ (1) - GNU project C and C++ Compiler (v2.7) gdb (1) - The GNU Debugger gnuplot (1) - an interactive plotting program info (1) - GNU's hypertext system make (1L) - GNU make utility to maintain groups of programsThe numbers after the entries tell you which section of the manual the pages belong to, for example section 1 is for user commands. You can find out more about sections of the manual with man man. But to finish the example, if you now wanted to know about bash for example you would type
man bash
which displays the manual page(s) for bash.