HELP
Navigate a VMS Help File

HELP is a FORTRAN77 program which can examine a VMS Help file and display the contents interactively.

HELP is only an imperfect emulation of DEC's HELP command. The display and navigation was primitive, but at the time it was vastly superior to the wretched UNIX MAN program, which simply dumped the entirety of some help page or document onto the screen, perhaps with paging, but with no easy way for the presenter to segment the data into logical topics that could be selected by the reader.

Licensing:

The computer code and data files described and made available on this web page are distributed under the GNU LGPL license.

Related Data and Programs:

HELP is available in a FORTRAN77 version and a FORTRAN90 version.

Source Code:

help.f, the source code.
help.csh, commands to compile the source code.

Sample HELP Files:

The following help files have the format used by the program, and can be examined and navigated by the program.

List of Routines:

MAIN is the main program for HELP.
ADDLIN is called whenever a new line is printed.
CAPCHR capitalizes a string.
CHRCHP capitalizes characters in a string.
CHRDB2 replaces strings of blanks by one blank.
CHRINP manages buffered input from the user.
CHRINT returns a character representation of an integer.
CHRREA reads data from a line.
CHRREL creates a character string representation of a real number.
CHRWRT writes a character STRING of characters to one or more output units.
FLUSHL flushes a string left.
HELLO prints out an initial message to the user.
HLPVMS navigates through a given VMS-style help file.
IGCF finds the greatest common factor of I and J.
INDATA works like a sort of COMMON block.
LENCHR returns the length of STRING up to the last nonblank character.
LEQI is a case insensitive comparison of two strings for equality.
NPAGE determines whether it's time to pause before printing more.
SETLIN sets the current line number.
SETPAG sets the number of lines per page.

You can go up one level to the FORTRAN77 source codes.