HP-UX Reference (11i v2 04/09) - 1M System Administration Commands A-M (vol 3)

intro(1M) intro(1M)

NAME

intro - introduction to system maintenance commands and application programs

DESCRIPTION

This section describes commands that are used chieﬂy for system maintenance and administration pur-

poses. The commands in this section should be used in conjunction with other sections of this manual, as

well as the

HP-UX System Administration manuals for your system.

Command Syntax

Unless otherwise noted, commands described in this section accept options and other arguments accord-

ing to the following syntax:

name [ option ( s )] [ cmd_arg ( s )]

where the elements are deﬁned as follows:

name Name of an executable ﬁle.

option One or more option s can appear on a command line. Each takes one of the following

forms:

-no_arg_letter

A single letter representing an option without an argument.

-no_arg_letters

Two or more single-letter options combined into a single command-line argu-

ment.

-arg_letter<>opt_arg

A single-letter option followed by a required argument where:

arg_letter

is the single letter representing an option that requires an argu-

ment,

opt_arg

is an argument (character string) satisfying the preceding

arg_letter ,

<> represents optional white space.

cmd_arg Path name (or other command argument) not beginning with

-,or -

by itself indicating

the standard input. If two or more cmd_args appear, they must be separated by white

space.

RETURN STATUS

Upon termination, each command returns two bytes of status, one supplied by the system giving the

cause for termination, and (in the case of ‘‘normal’’ termination) one supplied by the program (for descrip-

tions, see wait(2) and exit (2)). The system-supplied byte is 0 for normal termination. The byte provided

by the program is customarily 0 for successful execution and non-zero to indicate errors or failure such as

incorrect parameters in the command line, or bad or inaccessible data. Values returned are usually

called variously ‘‘exit code’’, ‘‘exit status’’, or ‘‘return code’’, and are described only where special conven-

tions are involved.

WARNINGS

Some commands produce unexpected results when processing ﬁles containing null characters. These

commands often treat text input lines as strings and therefore become confused upon encountering a null

character (the string terminator) within a line.