Help and Support

For a list of frequently encountered problems and messages, please see Notes on Common Error Messages

Online help in the Windows version is available simply by pressing F1 at any stage; you will be taken to a help page related to the currently selected item in the program. You can also press shift+F1, and click on a specific part of the program to get help about that item. The documentation can also be read on-line in any web browser at http://pgopher.chm.bris.ac.uk/Help/.

If you have queries about the program that are not answered by the help files, please contact help-pgopher@bristol.ac.uk

If you find a problem, please check the website, http://pgopher.chm.bris.ac.uk/, in particular the release notes page. The beta version page http://pgopher.chm.bris.ac.uk/pgopher-beta/ may also contain more recent versions. If the problem is reproducible, the following information will be required:

The version of PGOPHER used (This can be found from Help, About).
The operating system used.
The data files used
The stack trace of the crash, if available (see below).

Please send these to the e-mail address above. To avoid problems with blocked e-mails, please send any attachments in a separate message.

Stack Traces

Depending on how the program was compiled, PGOPHER may produce a stack trace.

Under Microsoft Windows, this will be saved to a "pgopher.log" file. A popup box will indicate the location of this file, which is normally in the same directory as the executable or the data file (depending on which is writeable). An entry is added to this file for each crash. If the program hangs Process Explorer may be able to create a stack trace (Right click on PGOPHER in process explorer, select "Threads" and "Stack").

On Linux systems, the trace will appear in PGOPHER's log window, or on the console. If the program hangs rather than crashes the following can be used to force the generation of a stack trace. The first step is to find the process ID; the system monitor application can be used to find this, or alternatively in a terminal window type the following:

ps ux | grep pgopher

which will produce an output looking something like this:

usera     5141  0.1  0.1 1730940 42856 pts/3   Sl   13:08   0:00 pgopher
usera     5234  0.0  0.0 118492   896 pts/3    S+   13:10   0:00 grep --color=auto pgopher

The first line here shows the PGOPHER process, for which we require the process ID, which is the first number on the line - here 5141. Use this number in the kill command:

kill -SEGV 5141

On Macs the trace will appear in PGOPHER's log window, or on the console. If you see a (system generated) "Report Problem" dialog the call stack is visible if you click on the "Show Details" button. If the program hangs, rather then crashing a stack trace can be generated using the "Activity Monitor" app that is present in all Macs - look in the utilities folder. After starting the Activity Monitor, click on the row showing PGOPHER, select "View", "Inspect Process" and click on the "Sample" button.