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Instruments & Support

While the ILL's neutron source has remained essentially unchanged during the lifetime of the Institute, the ILL's instruments and their components have been continually developed and improved to increase their effectiveness.

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Useful tools

There are a few standard notations that I will use in this file and also in general; these are explained below. I have also tried to compile any unusual terminology into the Glossary at the end of the file.

  • Arguments that are enclosed in [ ] are required.
  • Arguments that are enclosed in ( ) are optional. These are often one letter 'switches' which can be strung together. For example, the listing for ls reads 'ls (-adlR) [directory]' which means that you can enter "ls -al [directory]" or "ls -a [directory]" and so on.
  • '~/' represents your home directory
  • '.' represents the current directory, the directory you are currently in
  • '..' represents the parent directory, the directory one level above the one you are currently in

There are several wildcard symbols in UNIX:

  • '*' stands for any sequence of zero or more characters, so a* could be a, aa, a7, ady4.exe, etc.
  • '?' stands for any one character, so a? could be aa, ab, a7, a-, etc.

These can be inside of an argument, for example, a*.exe would include anything that begins with 'a', ends with '.exe', and has anything in the middle. a?.exe would include anything that begins with 'a', is followed by a single character, then ends with '.exe'.

In addition to these two wildcard symbols, square brackets can also enclose a selection of wildcard characters. For example, 'a[ab].exe' would include both 'aa.exe' and 'ab.exe'.

Please note that UNIX IS case-sensitive, so FOO is not the same as foo. If you have a directory named STUFF, then 'cd stuff' will not change to it, only 'cd STUFF' will.

In some cases, such as when more is run, the display will pause at the end of a page. Hitting the SPACEBAR will advance the display one page, ENTER will advance the display one line. "b" scrolls back one page and "h" will give a help page. See the entry on the more command for more information.

Finally, most of the command descriptions and options below are presented for C shell or tcsh. All of the SACL accounts have been configured to use tcsh as the default shell. Please note that some of the commands may not work the same way in other shells, for example, on the apollos.

And now, on with the show!