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"That was Zen. This is Tao"
- Peter da Silva
Unix has more than 200 different "basic" commands available. Except for
the ones restricted to the system administration, anyone can access and
use those commands. Good news is that information and help files about
those Unix commands are always accessible on-line.
They are known as man pages because
they were originally pages of the Unix Programmer's Manual. One
sidenote; the familiar abbreviation "RTFM" commonly used in e-mail and
Internet nowadays actually came from a Unix jargon, "Read The Fine
Manuals" - and figure out yourself instead of keep asking questions.
O.k., let's learn how to "RTFM" from inside of Unix. Let's say
I want to find out more about a command called "date". To do
that, I simply type following at system prompt
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$ man date
As you can guess, the "man" command can be followed by the name
of any other command. If you can't remember the exact name,
you can do a keyword search. For instance, if I need to find
command(s) that can be used to copy files, you use "man"
command with keyword 'copy':
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$ man -k copy
Here, the "-k" is called a "flag" and is to instruct the "man"
command to do a keyword search on the Unix command database
reside in the system. As a result, man command then gives you
a list of Unix commands that have something to do with the
keyword 'copy.' After examining the keyword search results,
you then use man command again to learn about a particular
command of your choice:
-
$ man command
where "command" is the command you want to know more about.
You'll find, especially at first, that it takes a bit of
deciphering to understand what the man page really says.
But if you start with simpler commands now, then the
more complex entries won't be as hard to read.
"man" uses the "more" command to
let you page through the reference pages. You can press spacebar or "f"
to forward/view the next page, and "b" to go back to previous page or
"q" to quit viewing.
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