commands/information/help    Nanvaent Player Commands

NAME
     help - The help system 

USAGE
     help [help page or topic] 
     man [help page or topic]

DESCRIPTION
     Help is a menu driven help system, written to make it easier to find
     the help you need.

     *********************************************************************
     Most of the information in this page is designed for advanced users.
     See "help nanvaent" if you are trying to locate information about the
     game.
     *********************************************************************
     
     Given an argument, three things can happen:
     1. It doesn't find any matches and returns you to the prompt.
     2. It finds a single match and displays that help page or list of help
        pages on a topic.
     3. It finds several matches, prints a list and exits. You then have
        to type help again, this time with enough of the word to
        distinguish it from the other matches.

     Note that any spaces you type in the help page/topic will be converted
     into underscores. This is so that people can write a help page called
     e.g. magic_missile and have other people reference it by 
     'help magic missile'.

     Given no argument, help goes into 'menu' mode. 

     Navigating

     There are two kinds of prompts in help. One is just a basic 'MORE'
     prompt to space output that is too long for the screen. At this prompt
     you can either type Enter to see the next page of output or 'q' to
     skip the rest of the output. 'Q' will quit help completely.

     The other prompt is the help prompt and is slightly more complex. It
     looks like this:

       Type: topic, q (Quit) . (Redisplay) .. (Up) :

       q  - Quits help
       .  - Redisplays whatever you just saw
       .. - Goes 'up' a topic level

     The prompt also accepts full or partial names of help pages or help
     topics. The search method used by help is called 'regular expressions'
     and if you type in a name at the prompt, the following happens:

     1. The current topic is searched for a match.
     2. If failed, the current topic is searched for a partial match. E.g.
        'nam' will become 'nam*'. Note that this allows you to abbreviate
        everything, as a '*' means "match anything with this '*'". 
     3. If failed, the whole set of help pages is searched
        using '*nam*'.

     This search system means you can type in the name of any help page at
     any prompt and leap straight there, but it also allows you to reach
     the help page in steps in case there are duplicate names.

     Regular Expressions

     Since we're using 'regexp' you can do a few things with the strings
     you search for, they don't really have to be straight strings. Here
     are a few examples:

     help [fimr]+ - Only list topics/help pages that consist of one or
                    more of the characters f,i,m,r. 'rm' and 'if' fits
                    this description.

     help ...     - Finds all help pages with names exactly four characters
                    long.

     help b.*     - Finds all help pages starting with 'b'.

     Remember that these examples can also be used on the help prompt, not
     just from the mud command line.

SEE ALSO
    The UNIX 'man' command (not available on Nanvaent, see any standard
    UNIX system or manual)