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: p-pomes@uiuc.edu (paul@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu)
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".
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: paul@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu
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: paul@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu
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: m-smith22@uiuc.edu (msmith@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
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