Indeed. We were always encouraged to Read the Fine Manual (RTFM).Another bit of expansion... The "man" (for manual) pages are an locally stored copy of the uinx/Linux programmers manual. Back in the day one would keep a physical book on hand--about 1.5" thick--that had all the man pages, plus some additional information. There have been various efforts to either replace man pages (such as using "info <command name>") or having commands supply their own help information by using either a "-h" or "--help" command line flag. The utility of these various sources is all over the landscape. You can also use a web search to see if anyone has written up how to use a command, though I've found that is better when dealing full applications (e.g. mysql/mariadb) than individual commands.man pages. Details are important.
By "main pages", do you mean the help displayed when I type df --help, or some other page that I haven't seen. Sorry, but those help screens are overwhelming to a first time user.
Tryfor an introduction.Code:
man man
Yes, everything is overwhelming for a first time user, but you don't need to understand everything immediately. You can park some questions for later, or use Google or DuckDuckGo to get as much information as you like.
If you're not sure what command you might be looking for, you can always try command written for bsd unix and included in Linux, "apropos". (There are quite a number of "bsdisms" that have survived into Linux. The "vi" visual editor was written at Berkeley and later licensed by AT&T after they failed to succeed at writing a screen editor of their own is one. The main thing AT&T did--a downgrade, in my opinion--was to replace termcap with terminfo. The former being human readable and--thus--much easier to update and add to.)
Statistics: Posted by ame — Tue Oct 08, 2024 8:37 am