Choosing What To Look For

How you choose to look up a particular message depends on

• how the message is constructed

• whether you are searching in a printed book or in the AnswerBook documentation

Variable Words and Numbers

Remember as you are searching that some words and numbers in messages vary when the messages are displayed. For example, the following message uses the name of the server affected, b5server in this case:

NFS read failed for server b5server

When message words or numbers vary, this book uses the words variable and number in the italics type face. So the previous message is listed in this book as:

NFS read failed for server variable

Variable words and numbers can appear anywhere in a message, even at the beginning. Because of this, messages are alphabetized by the first nonreplaced word or number in the message.

Frequently Duplicated Parts of Messages

Many messages you see are actually combined messages, often beginning with a program name. The five error messages in the following example are basically the same even though the command names are different.

• find: out of memory

• grep: out of memory

• ls: out of memory

• mount: out of memory

• fsck: out of memory

Rather than document this message at least five times, it appears in this book as the message "out of memory." Messages that contain colons (:) are often combined messages, and you might find that explanations of message sections are available separately.

So, if you don't find the beginning of a message in the book, and the message contains colons, search for other parts of the message.