Open System Services Shell and Utilities Reference Manual (G06.27+, H06.04+)

OSS Shell and Utilities Reference Manual

General Typographic and Keying Conventions

This document uses several typographic conventions. (See also Synopsis Format and

Conventions.)

Bold Bold words or characters represent system elements that you

must use literally, such as commands, ﬂags, pathnames, and

variable names. Bold type is always used to represent user

input; anything to be typed or entered by the user is

represented in bold type. (The EXAMPLES section is an

exception; in that section, constant width type represents

user input.)

Italic Italic words or characters represent variable values. When

italic type appears in user input examples, it represents a

portion of the input that varies according to the situation or

the user’s choice.

Constant width System output in command examples in the EXAMPLES

section is represented by constant width typeface. In

addition, constant width is used in descriptive text to

represent system messages.

Keystrokes Keystrokes are indicated by the name of the key to be pressed

in angle brackets in bold type: for example, <Return> or

<Tab>. Key names vary from one keyboard to the next; for

example, the <Esc> key may appear on your keyboard as

<Escape> and <Ctrl> as <Control>. You may not be able to

ﬁnd some of the keys referred to on your keyboard; consult

your hardware documentation or system administrator for

assistance.

When two keys are to be pressed at the same time, they are

shown together within the brackets, separated by a dash: for

example, <Ctrl-c>, which indicates that you should hold

down the <Ctrl> key and press the <c> key. (Note that

control characters in system output are represented as ˆC, ˆX,

and so on.)

In general, the <Delete> and <Erase> keys generate different

codes, but are functionally equivalent. While <Delete> is

usually mapped to ASCII code 127, represented by ˆ?, and

<Erase> is usually mapped to the ASCII backspace

character, ˆH, either can be mapped to another code on a

particular keyboard or system. If these keys do not have the

results described, consult the stty and tset reference pages or

your system administrator.

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