Gopher Help and Hints--UNIX

What is Gopher?

Gopher is distributed document delivery service available on the Internet. Gopher servers provide information that you can access by using a gopher client. Gopher clients are available for all EECS and CS machines. Gopher client programs let you travel across the Internet to access documents, search full-text indexes and phonebooks, and otherwise navigate through the vast realms of information offered by many different computers running Gopher server software at sites throughout the world. There are gopher client programs available for many different types of computers, including UNIX workstations, Apple Macintoshes, and IBM PC's.

The Gopher client and server programs communicate via the Gopher protocol, first developed in April, 1991 at the University of Minnesota. For more information about the Gopher protocol, you can use gopher to access the Minnesota Gopher server (called 'Boss Gopher').

There are several departments on campus which have set up Gopher servers.

There is also an X Windows version of gopher, xgopher. If you are using a workstation running X, you can find the program in /usr/sww/X11/bin and the manual page in /usr/sww/X11/man.

Accessing and using Gopher from a UNIX character terminal.

To access Gopher from a UNIX account, simply type gopher at the shell prompt. (If you get a 'gopher: Command not found' error message, first make sure /usr/sww/bin is in your path, then send mail to root on your machine.) A menu will appear with numbered options. To access the an item on the menu, you can either type the number of its entry, or move the cursor down to its position and press return. You can also access a particular gopher server directly by typing gopher hostname instead of just gopher. For example, gopher infocal takes you directly to the infocal gopher main menu.

Navigating through the Gopher menus

                To do:                                Use Keys
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Move from line to line                 arrow keys; or j to go down, k to
                                       go up
Select a menu item                     place the cursor next to the item and
                                       press return or type item number and
                                       press return
View next page of a multi-page menu    move the down arrow key until the next
                                       page appears, or press >, or +, or
                                       the space bar
View previous page of multi-page menu  move the up arrow key until the previ-
                                       ous page appears, or press < or -
                                       or b.
Get help                               ?
Go up a menu                           u
Return to home menu                    m
Quit Gopher                            q

Symbols

/

after a menu choice, indicates that the choice is a directory containing additional menu choices

<?>

next to a menu choice, means that you can perform a keyword search. Type in the word or phrase you want to find and press return. Results will be displayed in a new gopher menu.

^

represents the Control character: ^G means hold down the control key and type G.

Documents

Once you have used Gopher to find and view a document, there are a number of other things you can do. After you reach the end of a document, either by viewing the entire document or by typing q to go to the end of the document, you can type ? to get a list of options. If you want to send a document by e-mail, type m, and then enter the intended recipient's e-mail address, e.g. janp@eecs.berkeley.edu, in the box.

If you want to save a document to a file, type s, backspace over the title of the document, and enter a suitable file name. The file will be placed in the directory from which you started gopher.

If you want to print a file, you must be sure that your PRINTER environmental variable is set. If you are not sure, exit out of gopher and enter the command 'printenv' at the shell prompt. If PRINTER is not among the variables listed, add this line to your .cshrc file:

	setenv PRINTER lwxxx

where lwxxx is the name of your printer, e.g., lwc301. When this variable is set, you can run gopher and type p at the end-of-document prompt. The document will be sent to your printer.

Searching for items with Veronica

Veronica is a service within gopher that maintains an index of titles of gopher items, and provides keyword searches of those titles. Instead of the user having to wander aimlessly through all of the different servers, he or she can use veronica to search an index of gopher items from hundreds of gopher servers and find articles relating to a given topic. The articles found by the search are brought up in a menu that can be moved through in the same way as a normal Gopher menu.

To use veronica:

1. Place your cursor next to the 'Search Gopherspace Using Veronica' entry and press return. You will see options to 'search gopherspace using veronica' (which will look for documents and directories) and to 'search gopherspace for gopher directories' (i.e., ignore single documents). Choose the ordinary search if you want all information on your topic. Choose the gopher directories search if you want to find significant collections of information on your topic.
2. Place the cursor next to the option you want (or type its number) and press return. You will be prompted for a search word.
3. Enter a word you think will appear in the titles of documents on the topic you want. The search will usually last anywhere from a few seconds to a minute.

Several Gopher sites have set up veronica, and each veronica used a different index of documents and directories. If your search produces nothing, you can try a different server. Also in the Veronica menu are an entry on how to compose a search, and an entry containing general information about Veronica.