help solicited

[Brian Youmans]

This is not the usual work of the proofreaders list, but I thought it
might be a good place to look for the help I need.   What I would like
are some people willing to write up examples of the usage of various
commands, for inclusion in an upcoming "GNU Utilities" book which will
collect the manuals for many of the GNU command line utilities.  The
examples will be intended for beginning users who need an introduction
to using the commnand line.

Below are a couple of examples that I wrote up.  Feel free to criticize,
especially if there is something incorrect or vague!

If you are interested in writing up some of these yourself, please sit
down and write up a sample one for ls.  (My examples didn't go into any
options, but that's because I never use any of the options for cp, and
for beginning users I thought a more advanced usage example for date
was unnecessary.)  Send me your sample blurb for ls, and if I like it
I'll send you a list of commands to work on.

You have to be willing to assign copyright on this work to the FSF, and
able to get a disclaimer of copyright out of your employer if they have
a claim on your work.

- Brian Youmans, FSF office staff and publisher
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>cp foo bar

The cp command will copy a file from one place to another.  This
example copies the contents of a file named "foo" in the current
directory into another file named "bar" in the same directory.  If
"bar" does not already exist, it will be created.  Note that if "bar"
does already exist, its contents will be replaced with those of "foo"
without comment.

>cp ~bob/foo /gd/gnuorg/

This example copies a file named "foo" from the home directory of user
"bob" to the directory /gd/gnuorg/ (where the new file will also be called
"foo".)   "~bob" is a shorthand way of specifying a user directory that
Bash and other shells will understand.

For more info on cp, see the fileutils manual.

> date

Date will give you the current date and time; for example, the response
I just got was "Mon Sep 25 16:20:35 EDT 2000".
    This command can also be used to set the time and date on your computer;
for more info on date, see the sh-utils manual.