### 1.7 Conventions used in this manual

This manual contains many examples which can be typed at the keyboard. A command entered at the terminal is shown like this,

    $ command

The first character on the line is the terminal prompt, and should not be typed. The dollar sign ‘`$`’ is used as the standard prompt in this manual, although some systems may use a different character.

The examples assume the use of the GNU operating system. There may be minor differences in the output on other systems. The commands for setting environment variables use the Bourne shell syntax of the standard GNU shell (`bash`).