3.6. Obtaining Online Help: manThere are bound to be many times when you're at your terminal and you can't quite remember how to use a particular utility. Alternatively, you may know what a utility does, but don't remember what it's called. You may also want to look up an argument not described in this text. Linux systems have a utility called man (short for "manual") which puts this information at your fingertips. man works as shown in Figure 3-3.
The typical division of topics in manual page sections is as follows:
Sometimes, there is more than one manual entry for a particular word. For example, there is a utility called chmod and a system call called chmod (), and there are manual pages for both (in sections 1 and 2). By default, man displays the manual pages for the first entry that it finds, so it will display the manual page for the chmod utility. Here's an example of man in action: $ man -k permission ...search for keyword 'permission'. chmod (1) - change file access permissions console.perms [console] (5) - permissions control file for users at the system console access (2) - check user's permissions for a file chmod (2) - change permissions of a file fchmod [chmod] (2) - change permissions of a file ioperm (2) - set port input/output permissions ... q ...man uses the more command, use 'q' to quit. $ man chmod ...select the first manual entry. CHMOD(1) User Commands CHMOD(1) NAME chmod - change file access permissions SYNOPSIS chmod [OPTIONm]... MODEm[,MODEm]... FILEm... chmod [OPTIONm]... OCTAL-MODEm FILEm... chmod [OPTIONm]... --reference=RFILEm FILEm... DESCRIPTION This manual page documents the GNU version of chmod. ... q $ man 2 chmod ...select the manual entry from section 2. |