2. What am I supposed to know?

It is assumed that you:

have an account on spartan, one of the central servers at Brock;
know a little bit about Unix, its file and command structure, and some editor like vi or pico;
can use a mouse, are familiar with the concept of windows, and with the process of clicking and dragging to manipulate windows (closing, resizing, etc.).

If you feel that the above does not apply to you, let your instructor know now. Otherwise, you may want to start a separate shell window right away. In this window, you can then run plotdata and try different commands as we go along.

Briefly about the notation used in this document: this font is used to indicate a ``computer word'', i.e. a prompt or a message from a program, while something you need to type in shows up like this. In the latter case, a carriage return is implied at the end of every line of input.

One note of caution: Unix is fussy and distinguishes between lower and UPPER case letters, while plotdata often uses all capitals to name its special files. For example, PLOTDATA.JOURNAL is a log file of your session with a record of every plotdata command you typed in. If you want to examine or print that file, you need to refer to it in all uppercase, as in vi PLOTDATA.JOURNAL; trying to vi plotdata.journal will not work.

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