This page contains a series of documents to help you effectively use the unix 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.
The Unix survival guide is a particularly good place to start and gives a brief description of the commonly used commands available under unix along with some examples.
The Gnu Emacs Reference Guide describes the "emacs" editor which is found on many unix systems including all those in the department. It's probably best described as an editor on steroids - it is very powerful and flexible.
LaTeX is a typesetting program widely used in the scientific community. It is a very powerful and flexible text markup system which reads typesetting commmands and text from a file and produces high-quality output. Equations and mathematical theorems are handled particularly well, which is LaTeX's advantage over almost all "word processor"-type programs.
There are a number of LaTeX guides available.
You will often use script files within unix. A useful example is this .mycshrc which is used as part of the login process. It contains useful shortcuts and aliases that make the unix command line easier to use for some people. It also illustrates how you can customise your shell (command line) environment. If you include the line source .mycshrc in your .cshrc file (which is the default setup), then these commands will get executed every time you log in (the system "sources" your .cshrc file everytime you log in).
More advanced scripts can be used to analyse and display data, automate administration tasks etc. Some examples which use awk, gnuplot and idl to process mean.awk script can be used to calculate the mean and standard deviation of a column of data within the example datafile illustrates some of its features.
Gnuplot is quite a useful plotting package, especially when combined with awk scripts. The script plotdata.gnu was used to produce some postscript plots of the example data.
IDL is another environment which can be used for plotting. IDL is not just a plotting program though - it is a high level data analysis language. The IDL procedure plotdata.pro to produced some postscript plots of the example data. For more information about IDL, type ? at the prompt given by the idl program; this will display an interactive help window.