Reading Other Documentationon the Desktop

In earlier chapters, you learned to use a few basic Linux commands to manage your files from the command line. All Linux systems include the shell commands you already learned and many, many more as wellfar too many for any one person to be familiar with. Each command also offers the user a long list of options that can be used to affect its behavior. You'll learn more about how to use a number of these commands in Part IV, "Using the Linux Command Line," but in the meantime, you can begin to familiarize yourself with them by exploring their online documentation. Nearly every command in a Linux or Unix system offers online documentation via documents called man pages.

Why Are They Called man Pages?

The types of documentation being discussed in this section are called man pages after the shell command, man (short for manual), that is used to access them at the command line. You learn more about using the man command and its relative, info, to access online documentation in Chapter 18, "Becoming Familiar with Shell Environments."

Though man pages can be quickly accessed from the command line, they're also easily accessed on your Linux desktop using the help browser, which provides a fast, more user-friendly way of reading them.

Reading man Pages Using the Help Browser

As you learned in "Launching and Using the Systemwide Help Browser," there are a number of major categories of systemwide help. To access the online manuals for Linux commands, click on the Man Pages link shown in Figure 17.5. Clicking the Man Pages link leads to a list of the manual page sectionscategories of commands that you can read about in online documentation. Manual pages are available in these sections (the related man command sections are shown in parentheses):

• Applications (man command section 1)

• Configuration Files (man command section 5)

• Development (man command sections 2 and 3)

• Games (man command section 6)

• Hardware Devices (man command section 4)

• Overviews (man command section 7)

• System Administration (man command section 8)

More information on the division of system manual pages into sections and the meanings of each section number can be found in "Understanding Manual Page Sections" in Chapter 18.

Click any section in the list to open a list of manual pages offered for that section; Figure 17.8 shows a portion of the list of man pages available in the Applications section.

Figure 17.8. The alphabetical list of manual pages in each section is quite long.

When you locate the manual page you want to read, click its link to display it, as shown in Figure 17.9.

Figure 17.9. Displaying the manual page for the ls command.

Manual pages you read in the GNOME help browser are formatted according to the same guidelines used by the man command. Each manual page contains the following information:

• The man command section from which the manual page has been taken

• The name of the command, file, or device being documented and a brief (one-line) summary of its purpose

• A synopsis of how to use the command, file, or device

• A longer description in paragraph form, which provides more detailed information about the nature of the command, file, or device and the situations in which you might want to use it

• A summary of options and arguments that can be provided to alter the behavior of the command or a summary of the format of the configuration file in question

• Author, bug reporting, and copyright information

Exiting the Help Browser

Once you're done reading online manuals or documentation, you can choose File, Close Window from any display or manual to close the help browser application and return to your desktop.