You may wish to work from a "personal subdirectory", which means you would routinely "cd" to a subdirectory other than your home directory. SPSS, however, can be invoked from any subdirectory. The examples below will assume that files are stored and/or written to the current subdirectory (i.e., the directory from which you invoked SPSS). (Files that are not stored in the current subdirectory may be used, but must be specified with the complete home directory pathname. At present, the ~/, or tilde-slash, convention does not work in SPSS, but in most situations you can use the alternative $HOME to stand for your home directory. See below for more information and examples.)

SPSS under UNIX offers a tutorial, which was printed in a previous version of the UNIX Operations Guide (a manual which is now obsolete). The tutorial makes use of files which we have stored in /usr/usc/spss/tutorial. USC users can get a copy of the tutorial pages from the Statistics Consultant through the User Services office in LVL Lower Commons (213/740-5555).