Re: Linux Commands
On Tue, 23 Jun 1998, Dennis Dixon wrote:
> When I read the man pages, or any zip file that I have for that matter, I
> use the command: 'zmore xxxx.tar.gz'. This obviously is not the right
> command to view these files, in that the files have all sorts of control
> characters in them.
>
.tar.gz is not a text file, it's a tape archive. Thus the control
characters. zmore is correct for text files - try
zmore /usr/doc/copyright/GPL.gz for example, that should work.
(by the way, zless is much nicer - less is more.)
> Along the same lines, I downloaded a tar.gz file which was supposed to be in
> "Latex" format. I unzipped it with 'tar zxvf filename.tar.gz' which gave me
> numerous .tex files.
Good so far. This is a gzipped (compressed) tape archive full of LaTeX
files.
> Thinking I needed the Tetex package I downloaded and
> installed this. 'tex filename.tex' however gets me the error message;
> 'undefined control sequence' or something like that.
>
> Clearly I'm missing something. It can't be that hard to read a text file.
>
TeX is a typesetting language. LaTeX is a set of TeX macros. So LaTeX
files are TeX files, but they require special processing with the
latex program. If the directory has a Makefile, typing "make" will
probably do everything for you. Otherwise, the usual procedure is:
latex filename.tex
latex filename.tex # yes, do it twice - resolves any cross-references
dvips -o filename.ps filename.dvi
You are compiling the TeX source code into a .dvi file, which you can view
with xdvi, and then converting .dvi into postscript, which you can view
with gv. You can also read the .tex files with less, but the content will
be all mixed in with LaTeX commands, so it can be confusing. To print the
document, try 'lpr filename.ps', assuming you have a printer configured.
Havoc Pennington ==== http://pobox.com/~hp
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