The poop on Sys V Rel 2 Programmer's Manuals...

R. Curtis Jackson rcj at burl.UUCP
Tue Apr 24 09:13:19 AEST 1984


Here is the most definitive stuff I got, and my thanks to its
author who said I could post it:
---------------------------
Let's see.

v7, PWB 2.0, and System III all consisted of three manuals:
	"User's Manual" (that is, chapters 1-8, where 1 contains
			 user commands, 2 the system calls, and so on.)
	"Unix something, Volume 2a" (More detail on the shell, editor,
			 those kinds of things)
	"Unix something, Volume 2b" (More detail on the compiler, assembler,
			 those kinds of things.)
The 4.Xbsd distributions contain a "Volume 2c" that describes the Berkeley
tools like the Pascal subsystem and Franz Lisp.

Then came System V. There were now many more manuals, all soft cover. The
most obvious were
	"User's Manual" (All of chapter 1 except (1M), all of 2-6.)
	"Administrator's Manual" (Chapter (1M), 7, and 8.)
The sections on "awk" and the like, except for the tiny manual page, were
missing.

Then came System V Release 2.0. Even more manuals, but a scheme seemed to
be followed. There was "X Reference Manual" and "X Guide". For example, the
	"User's Reference Manual" (contains commands in (1) and maybe 6)
and the
	"User's Guide" (contains a little more information on editing and
			programming in the shell, similar to "Volume 2a" from
			system III)
are meant to be used as a set. There's the "Programmer's Reference Manual,"
which contains chapters 2-3, and the "Programmer's Guide," which I will 
assume tells you a little more about C/f77 programming (I haven't looked.)
I could go on, but you get the point.

A problem is that there's a DEC "X Reference Manual" and a 3B20 "X Reference
Manual" and a 3B5 "X Reference Manual" for a couple of choices of X. I don't
quite understand this.
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-- 

The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3313 (Cornet 291)
alias: Curtis Jackson	...![ ihnp4 ulysses cbosgd clyde ]!burl!rcj



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