Conventions used

Purely for simplicity, we use the male gender throughout this book. We know that the UNIX world includes people from more than one sex, so please don't take this limitation personally .

When discussing UNIX commands, we use boldface type, for example, when talking about the adb command or the vi editor.

When discussing kernel variables or symbols, such as msgbuf or panicstr , or other program variables, we use italics.

When referring to routines by name , we use () (parenthesis) after their name and italics again. As an example, we will talk a lot about the panic() routine.

When we refer to a directory, filename, or macro filename, such as /usr/include/sys/vnode.h , we again use the boldface. It will be quite obvious when we are discussing file names or commands, so we expect you won't get confused .

When referring to assembly instructions such as sethi or SPARC processor register such as %g0 , we use courier font.

When demonstrating commands, we show them in a box, using courier font. User input is shown in bold. For example:

 Hiya...  date  Sun Jan  8 19:12:30 GMT 1995  Hiya...  last  head  root      pts/4      s4c-ods          Fri Jan  6 16:29 - 16:31  (00:02)  peterd    pts/4      s4c-ods          Fri Jan  6 16:06 - 16:29  (00:23)  peterd    pts/7      greener          Thu Jan  5 14:36 - 14:36  (00:00)  peterd    pts/4      greener          Thu Jan  5 10:23 - 10:25  (00:02)  kbrown    ftp        zatch.Corp       Wed Jan  4 22:24 - 22:24  (00:00)  kbrown    ftp        zatch.Corp       Wed Jan  4 21:42 - 21:58  (00:15)  kbrown    pts/1      ulysses.East     Mon Jan  2 21:51 - 22:07  (00:15)  kbrown    pts/1      sunryse.East     Sat Dec 31 23:01 - 21:51 (1+22:49)  kbrown    ftp        pasta.UK         Sat Dec 31 22:49 - 22:58  (00:08)  kbrown    ftp        sunryse.East     Sat Dec 31 22:43 - 22:47  (00:04)  Hiya... 

Also, since we include actual screen dialogs, as shown above, you will see a couple of different shell prompts being used. In the above example, "Hiya " is the shell prompt.

Occasionally, to make things a bit more obvious, we underline key data in screen output. When we to do this, we point it out to you.

Finally, you'll find that throughout this book, we, the two authors, talk directly to you, our UNIX-guru-in-training. When we refer to the customer who sent us the crash dump, he will be referred to as a third person.