Computing Resources in the Department of Physics and Mathematical Physics

This page contains a series of documents to help you effectively use the computing resources available within the Department of Physics and Mathematical Physics. A summary file containing all the examples is located at the end of the document.

Unix survival guide. This guide is an introduction to unix with examples.

A Local guide to computing in the Department of Physics and Mathematical Physics. This lists information such as the available programs and computers within the department.

The Gnu Emacs Reference Guide. Emacs is quite a useful and powerful editor found on all(?) unix platforms. I use it a lot.

Latex is a typesetting program widely used in the unix environment. Latex is run on document files containing typesetting commands to produce a dvi file. This is then converted to postscript using dvips. One of reasons latex is used in the scientific environment is the relative ease in producing equations and inserting figures. This generally compensates for its occasional awkwardness.

An Introduction to Latex
The source file la.tex is a good introduction to latex illustrating how to produce document with equations and figures (including how to print it out). To produce the above postscript output you will also need this figure.
Another Latex example
This simple example was produced with the file hi.tex
Latex Math Commands
One of Latex strengths is its ability to produce high quality equations and mathematical symbols. The source file math.tex shows how to produce them.

You will often use script files within unix. A useful example is this .mycshrc that I have produced. It contains useful shortcuts and aliases that make the unix command line environment powerful and illustrates how you can customise your environment. If you include the line
source .mycshrc
in your .cshrc file, then these commands will get executed every time you log in (the system "sources" your .cshrc file everytime you log in).

I have also produced some example script files to illustrate the use of awk, gnuplot and idl to analyse and display data. The following examples will use this data.

Awk is a unix program which can be used to read data from a file and perform searches and various operations on the data. I have written an example script which can be used to calculate the mean and standard deviation of a column of data within a datafile to illustrate some of its features.

Gnuplot is quite a useful plotting package, especially when combined with awk scripts. I used this gnuplot script to produce some postscript plots of the data.

For more serious plotting and analysis you will probably want to use IDL (Interactive Data Language). I used this script to produce some postscript plots of the data. IDL is a very useful plotting and analysis package with many inbuilt functions. Type ? at the idl prompt to get a help window.

If you don't want to grab each link I have tar'ed and compressed all of the above into the file unix_tute.tar.Z . Save this file then uncompress and untar it
(uncompress unix_tute.tar.Z; tar xvf unix_tute.tar).

Me
Chris Wilkinson (cwilkins@physics.adelaide.edu.au)
 Mail me for comments.