You can use GT.M with any UNIX shell as long as environment variables and scripts are consistently created for that shell. In this manual, all examples that involve UNIX commands assume use of the Bourne shell. They also assume that your environment has been set up as described in the chapters on "Installing GT.M" and "Basic Operations" in the GT.M Administration and Operations Guide.

The examples are instructive and detail the related error messages that appear if you try the examples. However, due to implementation and shell differences, you may occasionally obtain different results. Any differences should be relatively minor, but it is advisable to try the exercises in a database environment that will not effect valued information.

In very rare cases, some examples that syntactically must occur on the same line may appear on multiple lines for typesetting purposes. In the case of those examples the continued lines are indented by a quarter of an inch.

The examples make frequent use of literals in an attempt to focus the reader's attention on particular points. In normal usage variables are used far more frequently than literals.

For each published version of the Programmer's Guide, there is a revision number with publication date and revision description. A revision history of these revision numbers is maintained on the main page of the Programmer's Guide. Each chapter starts with a revision history that ties back to the main document history, so the manual revisions increase regularly, but the chapter revisions increase irregularly depending on which publications of the manual include changes to that chapter.