Swarthmore College Department of Computer Science

ninjas and getting help

Some of our classes, like CS21 and CS35, have ninjas or student mentors. They usually hold one or two study sessions each week. If you're having trouble with your homework assignments, check our cs ninjas page for the study session times.

If you need help with the Computer Science systems, ask the sysadmins by sending mail to . This is a special mail alias read by all the sysadmins and a few Professors. Sending questions here will normally get a quicker response than sending something directly to a specific sysadmin.

Also, if you are getting error messages and want us to try to figure out why, please send a copy of the exact error messages (if you can), along with the specific commands you tried. If we are able to reproduce the error messages on our own, we will have a much better chance of figuring out what is wrong.

If you want help with a specific command, you could try the man pages. If you know the command name, just type man command. For example, to read the man page for xlock, type man xlock. If you're not sure what you're looking for, use the -k option to search. For example, to search for man pages about compilers, type man -k compiler.

Here are some useful online resources, if you want to try to figure things out for yourself!

related links