Equivalent to Oracle's describe

Hi, I'm new to the Informix world, and miss the "describe" command in Oracle that displays the column names and datatypes for a given table or view. I realize that if I run dbaccess in its menu driven mode that I can get this information, but for whatever reason I'm just not that into the fancy ASCII menus. Also, can anyone recommend a good reference for the Informix system catalog? I imagine I could answer my first question above if I knew which catalog tables to look in. thanks -- James