Typographical Conventions

When we display interactive input and output we'll show our typed input in a bold font, and the computer output like this. Comments are added in italics.

 bsdi %  telnet svr4 discard   connect to the discard server  Trying 140.252.13.34...  this line and next output by Telnet client  Connected to svr4.

Also, we always include the name of the system as part of the shell prompt ( bsdi in this example) to show on which host the command was run.

Throughout the text we'll use indented, parenthetical notes such as this to describe historical points or implementation details.

We sometimes refer to the complete description of a command in the Unix manual as in ifconfig (8). This notation, the name of the command followed by a number in parentheses, is the normal way of referring to Unix commands. The number in parentheses is the section number in the Unix manual of the "manual page" for the command, where additional information can be located. Unfortunately not all Unix systems organize their manuals the same, with regard to the section numbers used for various groupings of commands. We'll use the BSD-style section numbers (which is the same for BSD-derived systems such as SunOS 4.1.3), but your manuals may be organized differently.