Definition of Support

User support applies to major software products widely used at Rutgers. It includes tested, applied, and put-into-production updates from the vendor; availability of consulting; and complete user documentation, which may include local material. Training/education seminars will be provided as appropriate to users' needs.

OIT will give high priority to documenting and reporting errors to the vendor and to the user community, and in obtaining and applying software corrections. Information concerning enhancements or changes from the vendor will be made available to users soon after public release. The user will be notified of impending removal of supported software from the system as far in advance as possible.

Here is a partial list of software available on the RCI and ICI systems. For almost all programs listed in this document, the text of the UNIX manual entry can be retrieved at the UNIX prompt by typing man <command>, e.g., man lush.

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Operating System

• UNIX (Solaris)

UNIX Shells/User Interfaces

• csh (C SHell)
• lush (command menus interface for your Rutgers UNIX account)
• sh (Bourne SHell)
• tcsh (The Tsr C SHell with file name completion and command line editing)
• X Window System (links to information)

Math/Statistical

• SAS * - Version 8.2 is available on Rutgers machines. The NBCS Information Center has produced four documents that will help you use SAS on UNIX.
• SPSS - SPSS for UNIX is available on Rutgers machines. Three documents are available from the NBCS Information Center describing the use of SPSS on UNIX.

Electronic Mail

• Pine * - Pine is the OIT recommended and supported electronic mail program on UNIX. The Information Center has produced two documents explaining how to use Pine. The University of Washington's Pine Information Center also includes several helpful resources on the use of Pine.

Document Editing/Preparation

• Emacs * - A powerful text editor for UNIX. There are several online information sources available for Emacs, including an Introduction to the Emacs Text Editor and command Reference Card prepared by the NBCS Information Center; a complete manual is also available from the Free Software Foundation.
• Ghostscript - A program used to display and print files in PostScript (.ps) format. A manual is available from the UNIX prompt (type man gs); you can also consult a document explaining How to Use GhostScript; Aladdin Ghostscript Version 4.03.
• Pico - The PIne COmposer: a simple text editor developed by the University of Washington for maximum compatibility with its e-mail program Pine, the program's screen display format is very similar to Pine; command help is available within the program and a manual is accessible from the UNIX prompt.

Machine Readable Data Files

• Compustat - The Compustat data files contain descriptions of over 18,000 companies, with 20 years of market history, financial and stock data. Computing Services does not provide the Compustat database. You should contact the School of Business regarding access to these files.
• ICPSR - Rutgers is a member of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, which provides data sets for a wide number of subjects for social and political science research. Access to studies produced by ICPSR is provided by the Social Sciences Data Center located in the Scholarly Communication Center at Alexander Library.

Spelling Utilities

• ispell - An interactive spell-checking program. The program checks the words in text files you specify against its own dictionary, and you can update a "private" dictionary to supplement the word list that comes with the program.
• dict - This program allows you to access the following reference tools from your account: the Concise Oxford Dictionary, 8th Edition (default), the Oxford Thesaurus (-t), the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations merged with the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations (-q), and the CIA World Factbook (-w).

Utilities

• agrep - The "approximate grep" utility allows searching through a file or many files for imprecise character strings or regular expressions using command options for approximate matching. A help page explains the options.
• check-criteria - A program written for RCI users who are considering requesting an increase in their account quotas. The program enables users to take the preliminary step of checking on the efficiency of their current usage, based on criteria written by NBCS.
• dos2unix - This command converts characters in the DOS extended character set to the corresponding ISO standard characters. Useful when making use of files created on PCs.
• gzip/gunzip - A file compression/decompression utility. The Gzip Home Page contains helpful information about gzip and its uses.
• less - A program used to display files on your screen; similar to the standard UNIX command more, but containing additional features for more flexible movement through a file
• newer - When this command is entered with the name of a file in your directory, it will exit with a status equal to the number of files that are newer than the first file listed. If any files are not found a negative number is returned.
• pgp - The "Pretty Good Privacy" public key encryption package is used to protect E-mail and data files. It lets you communicate securely with other people, and no secure channels needed for a prior exchange of keys. A good online article, "PGP for You and Me," provides a helpful introduction to the program and its uses.
• quota - This program enables you to check the status of your account usage against your account quota for both your mail directory and your other directories.
• who - This command returns a list of the names of individuals currently logged into the system you are using.
• wxmap - An X tool for producing graphical weather maps on X workstations. The program can still be run non-X environments to look up weather conditions around the country and to read forecasts, but the map command won't work to draw the maps.
• zap - This program runs the ps (active processes report) program for you in an interactive mode by selecting those processes that match the pattern you supply. Once it identifies the processes you specify, it asks you whether you want to kill each of them.
• zcat - A utility to decompress files; it writes the uncompressed file to standard output and is therefore identical to gunzip -c
• zip - A file compression utility. Useful or packaging a set of files for distribution, for archiving files, and for saving disk space by temporarily compressing unused files or directories.

Programming Languages/Language Utilities

The following languages may be run on Computing Services systems. While we will help with running compilers, we cannot provide help in writing or debugging programs in any of these languages.

• awk
• bison/yacc
• C
• C++
• cscope
• flex/lex
• FORTRAN 77
• FORTRAN 90
• gawk
• gdb/dbx
• lisp
• pascal
• perl