PH INFORMATION ON PEOPLE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

The Nameserver database holds information for approximately 70,000 UIUC
faculty, staff, and students.  This is the information that is most
commonly requested by users of the database.

Faculty and staff information is provided by the University Payroll
Office and consists primarily of name, title, and home/office addresses
and phone numbers.  Like the printed copy of the campus phone book,
faculty/staff information in the ph database is updated once a year
during the month of November.  All personal ph entries, however, can be
manually updated at any time during the year to reflect changes in
personal or professional information or to add new fields to one's own
Nameserver entry (see help on "edit", "make", and "fields").

The student information in the ph database comes from the Office of
Admissions and Records.  Anyone who is taking a class at the University
is listed in the database along with his or her phone number, address,
curriculum, and, in the case of undergraduates, high school.  Student
data is updated four times a year during the months of January, June,
September, and October.

EXAMPLES:
To look up information about an individual on campus, enter the command
"ph" followed by the person's name.  Ph looks for every record in the
Nameserver database whose "name" and/or "nickname" fields contain the
name(s) specified in the query.  The following example shows a query on
the name "Paul Pomes":

  ph> ph paul pomes
  ----------------------------------------
              name: pomes paul b
             phone: (217) 333-6262
           address: 1429 DCL, MC 256
                  : 1304 West Springfield Avenue
                  : Urbana, Illinois  61801-2910
   office_location: 1429 Digital Computer Lab
        department: computing and communications services office
             title: sr res programmer
             hours: Mon: 9:00 to 17:00
                  : Tue-Fri: 13:00 to 18:00
          email to: [email protected] ([email protected])
  ----------------------------------------

Matching in ph is not sensitive to upper and lower case letters and is
done on a word-by-word basis.  That is, both the query and the entry
are broken up into words, and the individual words are compared.  Thus,
the expressions "ph paul pomes", "ph pomes paul", and "ph Paul Pomes"
would all produce the same results.

Although ph is insensitive to case, it otherwise requires words to match
exactly, with no characters left over; "john" does not match "johnson",
for example.  When the exact spelling of a person's name isn't known,
it can be useful to ask the Nameserver for entries that are "sort of
like" something.  This can be done by using special characters called
"metacharacters".  If you are familiar with the metacharacters used by
the UNIX shells for filename expansion, you'll be glad to know the
Nameserver uses the same metacharacters.

Specifically, the following metacharacters mean the following things to
the Nameserver:

  ? = any one character; "jo?n" would match "john", "joan",
      "join", etc.

 [] = any one of the characters between the brackets ([]);
      "jo[ah]n" would match "john" or "joan", but not "join".

  * = any characters or no characters; "jo*n" would match "john",
     "joan", and "join", and also "jon" or "johann".

Since the Nameserver and the shell use the same metacharacters, when
using ph from the operating system command line, it is important that
metacharacters be quoted or escaped to "protect" them from the shell.
Where you might use the following query from within ph:

  ph> query pa* pomes

from the Unix shell you should say:

  % ph pa\* pomes

or

  % ph "pa*" pomes

Queries on people in the Nameserver database return a default set of
fields and, thus, may not display all of the fields in a person's ph
entry.  To view an entry in its entirety, add the clause "return all"
to the end of the query expression.  For example:

  ph> ph paul pomes return all
  ----------------------------------------
               alias: p-pomes
                name: pomes paul b
               email: [email protected]
               phone: (217) 333-6262
        office_phone: (217) 333-6262
          home_phone: (217) 359-0881
                 fax: (217) 244-7089
             address: 1429 DCL, MC 256
                    : 1304 West Springfield Avenue
                    : Urbana, Illinois  61801-2910
      office_address: 1429 DCL, MC 256
                    : 1304 West Springfield Avenue
                    : Urbana, Illinois  61801-2910
     office_location: 1429 Digital Computer Lab
        home_address: 717 West Washington Street
                    : Champaign, IL  61820-3334
               proxy: !!
            nickname: pbp paulp avatar
           no_update: !!
          department: computing and communications services office
               title: sr res programmer
               hours: Mon: 9:00 to 17:00
                    : Tue-Fri: 13:00 to 18:00
              family: Kali, Dylan Freeman, Alanna Ruth, Roku & Suza
         high_school: Downers Grove South, 1976
                type: person phone
            kerberos: p-pomes
                slip: 128.174.22.63
  ----------------------------------------

A return clause can also be used to limit the fields that are displayed.
To view specific fields in an entry, follow the selection clause by the
word "return" and a list of the fields you want to see (with the field
names separated by spaces).  For example:

  ph> ph paul pomes return name email hours
  ----------------------------------------
       name: pomes paul b
      hours: Mon: 9:00 to 17:00
           : Tue-Fri: 13:00 to 18:00
      email: [email protected]
  ----------------------------------------

In order to ensure that the Nameserver is not used for generating mailing
lists or other violations of privacy to persons listed in the database,
only a limited number of entries are printed for any given query.  If
a query results in more matching entries than this limit (currently 25),
no entries will be printed; instead, the user will receive a "too many
entries to print" message.  If, in trying to locate one particular entry,
you get this message, try reducing the number of matching entries by
using additional field specifiers or a more complete version of the
person's name in the selection clause.

The following example shows what happens when a query results in too
many matches:

  ph> query m* smith
  502:Too many entries to print.

By adding some extra information to the selection clause (in this case,
some information about the person's department), ph is able to display
information about all of the "M. Smiths" who work in the department
specified:

  ph> query m* smith department=super*
  ----------------------------------------
             name: smith michael d
            phone: (217) 244-7714
          address: 304 Advanced Computation Building
       department: supercomputing applicatns
            title: res programmer
         email to: [email protected] ([email protected])
  ----------------------------------------

In short, metacharacters can be used when you don't know enough
information about a person to produce matching entries, and field
specifiers can be used to narrow down the number of possible matches by
providing additional search criteria.  Return clauses are useful for
controlling the information that is actually printed for matching
entries.

SEE ALSO: edit, fields, make, query, type, introduction

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