Added intro paragraph about section, plus a paragraph

about exit status values.  Move "user intro" text to NOTES.

diff --git a/man1/intro.1 b/man1/intro.1
index 1e7d02f0da02dd8584c8f3a668109944f391c1df..b2088cddf04c175cde6abbd664f3b5c598842d9b 100644 (file)
--- a/man1/intro.1
+++ b/man1/intro.1
@@ -20,10 +20,30 @@
 .\" Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by
 .\" the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work.
 .\"
+.\" 2007-10-23 mtk Added intro paragraph about section, plus a paragraph
+.\"     about exit status values.
+.\"
 .TH INTRO 1 2002-08-06 "Linux" "Linux User's Manual"
 .SH NAME
 intro \- Introduction to user commands
 .SH DESCRIPTION
+Section 1 of the manual describes user commands and tools,
+for example, file manipulation tools, shells, compilers,
+web browsers, file and image viewers and editors, and so on.
+
+All commands yield a status value on termination.
+This value can be tested (e.g., in most shells the variable
+.I $?
+contains the status of the last executed command)
+to see whether the command completed successfully.
+A zero exit status is conventionally used to indicate success,
+and a non-zero status means that the command was unsuccessful.
+(Details of the exit status can be found in
+.BR wait (2).)
+A non-zero exit status can be in the range 1 to 255, and some commands
+use different non-zero status values to indicate the reason why the
+command failed.
+.SH NOTES
 Linux is a flavor of Unix, and as a first approximation
 all user commands under Unix work precisely the same under
 Linux (and FreeBSD and lots of other Unix-like systems).