Topic: General Help

This is a brief summary explaining how to interpret these help files.

You will see, in various places throughout these help pages, text
that looks like this:

	add <list> <user> [fullname]

This may be hard on one's eyes, but it's simple to translate.  These
notations are used to explain how to construct a command or other set
of information to give to listmanager, OR to how to interpret something
that listmanager sends back to you.  In the above example there are three
types of information: text, meta-text, and optional meta-text.

Text is just text.  In the above example, the word "add" translates literally,
so in the command you are building, you just put the word "add".

Meta-text is a word that represents what would go in place of the meta-text.
In this case, "<user>" is meant to represent the e-mail address of a user
(e.g. jdoe@hookup.net).

Optional meta-text is the same as meta-text, except that it may be omitted
from the final product.  In this example, "fullname" is the full name of the
user being added to a mailing list, but this can be omitted if such information
is not known or doesn't need to be recorded.

Completing our example, let's assume we're talking about the hookup-announce
list, and we're adding someone named "John Doe" to the list, whose e-mail
address is jdoe@hookup.net.  The syntax of the "add" command is:

	add <list> <user> [fullname]

...and you replace the meta-text with the appropriate data to construct the
command:

	add hookup-announce jdoe@hookup.net John Doe