Rob MacLeod
To track patients in the SCOR grant, we have developed a program that compares patients in our database against the list of names in the obituary published each day on the World Wide Web for the Salt Lake Tribune. By gathering the information from the web site and running the program on it, we will get notice immediately of any subject that has died, and hence becomes an important member of the study group.
This document describes the steps in gathering and scanning the obituary data.
The sequence of events necessary to check the obituary for deaths that match our patient database are as follows:
Obituaries and Guest Books for 9/19/2002 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Page 1 of 1 Show Go ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andrews, Ronald "Ronnie"- Ronald "Ronnie"Andrews Ronald Andrews passed away Sept 9, 2002, at Holladay, Utah. He was born Aug 4, 1935, Stoke-on-Trent, England to Thom-as William and ....More ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Banchero, John D.- John D. Banchero John David Banchero, 63, a man of generous spirit, thoughts and deeds, died Sunday, Sept. 15 of complications from Myelodysplastic Syndrome. ....More ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bradley, Terry A.- Terry A. Bradley My sweetheart of 33 years died of liver cancer on September 14, 2002, surrounded by his family. Born on August 28, ....More ------------------------------------------------------------------------
The details of each step follow.
Someone, probably Marsh, or someone with Marsh's help, will maintain a copy of the latest patient list. Find out where this is and copy it to the SGI, using the same procedure as for the obit file. Put it in the same subdirectory as the obit files.
The program that compares the patient and obituary lists is called checkdeath and this resides on the SGI so you must be logged into either mom, orthus, or tandem to run it. The steps are as follows:
checkdeath patient-filename obit-filename
Where you supply the patient and obit filenames
There will be output to the screen reporting the progress and success of the program and also email sent automatically to Rob of any successful hits.
To learn more about our computer setup, surf over to www.cvrti.utah.edu/computing.shtml.
The three SGI computers in the CVRTI are mom, orthus, and tandem (or more exactly, mom.cvrti.utah.edu, tandem.cvrti.utah.edu, and orthus.cvrti.utah.edu) and all can be reached by the same programs that you use to reach the Vax; just point them at the new machines.
Logging in to a Unix machine is essentially the same as on the Vax, it just
looks different. You will get a prompt, where you will enter your user
name, then another prompt, and your password. What happens next depends on
where you are sitting (on the SGI console or at your Macintosh) but you
will at least get one window where you can type commands. The prompt line
will tell you what machine you are on and in which directory, for example
mom:allen/text/misc>
tells you that the current directory is Nancy's ``misc'' subdirectory in her
``text'' subdirectory below her main directory, which is called
``allen, and she is logged into mom.
To log out again, enter ``lo'', ``logout'', or use the Control-D combination.
If you are on the console of the SGI, you must also log out from the window system. To so this move the mouse to a blank part of the screen and push and hold the right mouse button. A menu box offers the option to log out; slide the mouse down to select this option, then release the mouse button. You will be asked to confirm this decision before it takes effect.
subsectionBasic Commands
Below are some of the most-used commands in UNIX. To learn more about them, see the online manual entries for each (eg., man command)
| Command name | Arguments | Description |
| ls | filename(s) | list files in the current directory. |
| ll | filename(s) | list files but with longer listing. |
| cd | (sub) directory name | change current directory |
| cp | source-file destination-file | copy files |
| mv | source-file destination-file | move or rename a files or files |
| more | filename | print the contents of a file to the screen, equivalent of ``type'' |
| rm | filename(s) | remove or delete a file or files |
| w | none | is on the system, equivalent to ``show users'' |
| lo | none | exit the session and log out. If there are stopped jobs from the session, either enter logout a second time, or, better still, use fg to reactivate each of the stopped jobs and exit them properly before logging out. |
| man | command-name | view online manual pages for any command |
At the basic level, ask people you know use the SGIs regularly (all faculty, graduate students, Ted, Marshall, Matt, Bob, Phil, etc.,). There are numerous books on Unix around, but ask someone which ones are worth reading before you waste time wandering the shelves in the Graphics Lab.
For online reminders, use the ``man pages'', which list the essentials of each command on the system. Just enter man command-name at the command line.
For system information like how to mount disks, where the disks are, how and where to print, etc.,, look at CVRTI computer web site under the ``news'' items under the SGI Usage section.
This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 99.2beta6 (1.42)
Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996,
Nikos Drakos,
Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
Copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999,
Ross Moore,
Mathematics Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
The command line arguments were:
latex2html -split 3 -no_white -link 3 -no_navigation -no_math -html_version 3.2,math -show_section_numbers checkdeath
The translation was initiated by Rob MacLeod on 2002-09-19