GNU Astronomy Utilities: Conventions

GNU Astronomy Utilities manual

In this manual we have the following conventions:

All commands that are to be run on the shell (command line) prompt as the user start with a $. In case they must be run as a super-user or system administrator, they will start with a #. If the command is in a separate line and next line is also in the code type face, but doesn’t have any of the $ or # signs, then it is the output of the command after it is run. As a user, you don’t need to type those lines.
If the command becomes larger than the page width a \ is inserted in the code. If you are typing the code by hand on the command line, you don’t need to use multiple lines or add the extra space characters, so you can omit them. If you want to copy and paste these examples (highly discouraged!) then the \ should stay.
The \ character is a shell escape character which is used commonly to make characters which have special meaning for the shell loose that special place (the shell will not treat them specially if there is a \ behind them). When it is a last character in a line (the next character is a new-line charactor) the new-line character looses its meaning an the shell sees it as a simple white-space character, enabling you to use multiple lines to write your commands.