MPE/iX Shell and Utilities Reference Manual, Vol 1

intro(1) MPE/iX Shell and Utilities intro(1)
The synopsis line shows options in bold Courier font. Note that the case of letters is
important; for example, in the synopsis of ls, –f and –F are different options, with different
effects.
In the description of ls, all options are shown in one long string after the single dash.
Another common option form is
–x value
where –x is a dash followed by a character, and value provides extra information for using
that option. For example, the sort command takes unsorted input and sorts it; here’s the
command’s synopsis:
sort [–cmu][–o outfile][–tchar][–yn][–zn][–bdfiMnr]
[-k startpos[,endpos]] ... [file ...]
In this example, we have the option
–o outfile
This option tells the sort command where to save its sorted output. The form of the option
is –o, followed by a space, followed by outfile. In a command synopsis, anything appearing in
italics is a placeholder for information that you are expected to supply. Sometime after the
synopsis, the man page will explain what kind of information is expected in place of the
placeholder. In our sort example, outfile stands for the name of a file where you want sort
to store its output. For example, if you wanted to store the output in the file sorted.dat,
you would specify
sort –o sorted.dat
(followed by the rest of the command).
You will notice that the synopsis for sort also contains an option of the form
–tchar
This is similar to the option form we were just discussing, except that there is no space
between the –t and char. As before, char in italics is a placeholder; in this case, it stands for
any single character. If you want to use the –t option for sort, you just type –t followed
immediately by another character, as in
sort –t:
In this case, we use a colon (:) in the position of the placeholder x.
Commands and Utilities 1-3