MPE/iX Shell and Utilities Reference Manual, Vol 1

intro(1) MPE/iX Shell and Utilities intro(1)
The end of the sort synopsis is
[file ...]
This means a list of one or more file names; the ellipsis (...) stands for repetitions of what-
ever immediately precedes it. Since there are square brackets around the previous list, the list
can be omitted if you like.
The synopsis of ls ended in
[pathname ...]
As you might guess, this means that an ls command may end with an optional list of one or
more path names. (What’s the difference between this and our sort example? A pathname
may be the name of either a file or a directory; a file is always the name of a file.)
The order of items on the command line is important. When you type in a command line, you
should specify the parts of the command line in the order they appear in the command synop-
sis. The exceptions to this are options marked with a – ; they do not have to be given in the
exact order shown in the synopsis. However, all the – options must appear in the correct area
of the command line. For example, you can specify
ls –l –t myfiles
ls –t –l myfiles
but you won’t get correct results if you specify
ls myfiles –l –t ***incorrect***
ls –l myfiles –t ***incorrect***
and so on. If you type the last command, for example, ls interprets –t as the path name of a
file/directory and the command will try to list the characteristics of that item.
As a special notation, most
MPE/iX Shell and Utilities commands let you specify –– to separate
the options from the non-option arguments; –– means: ‘‘There are no more options.’’ Thus if
you really have a directory named –t, you could specify
ls –– –t
to list the contents of that directory.
Description
The DESCRIPTION section describes what the command does and how each of the options
work. For particularly complex software, this section may be divided into a large number of
subsections, each dealing with a particular aspect of the command.
1-4 Commands and Utilities