The Workshop is designed to help you anticipate possible questions, review what you've learned, and begin learning how to put your knowledge into practice.
Quiz
1:
What command lets you list all the commands you've already run?
2:
How do you reuse one of these commands?
3:
When both man and info show documentation for a particular command, which documentation is likely to be more complete?
4:
Why are there multiple man sections?
5:
How do you call the man command with reference to a specific section?
Answers
A1:
The history command lists all the commands you've already run, from oldest to newest.
A2:
To reuse a command that appears in your history, enter an exclamation mark (!) followed by the number of the command in your history.
A3:
The info documentation is usually more complete when both man and info cover a specific topic.
A4:
A single topic word might refer to several different commands or facilities in Linux. Multiple sections enable manual pages to be grouped logically according to functioncommands with other commands, file formats with other file formats, and so on.
A5:
Include the number of the section you want to reference before the topic word or command. For example, to see the section 5 manual page for passwd, you use man 5 passwd.
Activities
To familiarize yourself with virtual consoles, log in to several of them at once, without logging out of any of them. Type the ls command in each one, just for fun. Then switch to each one in turn and log out before finally returning to your desktop.
Spend some time looking at the manual pages for the commands you learned about in Chapters 6 and 7.
Start the info browser and try navigating through some of the info documentation to familiarize yourself with info navigation and with the types of information available.
Try using the apropos command with a few interesting words you've encountered while learning Linux, just to see whether any manual pages discuss them.