From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: michael@kjorling.se (Michael =?utf-8?B?S2rDtnJsaW5n?=)
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2017 18:18:56 +0000
Subject: [TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980
In-Reply-To: <0d7c61c7-7f5a-1854-64c3-737f4de1233c@gmail.com>
References: <0d7c61c7-7f5a-1854-64c3-737f4de1233c@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20171110181856.GF994@h-174-65.A328.priv.bahnhof.se>

On 10 Nov 2017 12:00 -0600, from will.senn at gmail.com (Will Senn):
> In V7, it's trickier because apropos doesn't exist, or the
> functional equivalent man -k, for that matter and books are hard to
> find (most deal with System V or BSD. I do find the command 'find
> /usr/man -name "*" -a -print | grep task' to be useful in finding
> man pages, but it's not as general as apropos.
> 
> So, what was the process of learning unix like in the V7 days? What
> were your goto resources? More than just man and the sources? Any
> particular notes, articles, posts, or books that were really helpful
> (I found the article, not the book, "The Unix Programming
> Environment" by Kernighan and Mashey, to be enlightening
> https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1981/04/01667315.pdf)?

Semi-related thought, possibly helpful: Did the manuals (I mean the
printed ones) have indexes that were meaningful for such purposes? I'm
thinking something like the output of apropos / man -k, not just a
listing of command names and page numbers.

Sure knowing that the description for how to use ls was in section 1
page 42 might have been _helpful_, but not really for finding out _how
to list files_ in the first place...

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
                 “People who think they know everything really annoy
                 those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)