Administering Networking OS — Getting Help (CLI) #5

College Online Material

Mat Gathu

Introduction to Man Command

Man Pages

• Man pages are usually available for commands, functions, or files
• Man pages are available on the local system

$ man [options]
$ man file

Controlling The Man Page Display

• The man page will be displayed by a pager program, either less or more (less is usually used)
• h to view help |spacebar to move forward | / to start a search | q to quit

Man Pages Section

• The word sections have two important meanings for man pages.
• Each man page is broken down under different section heading like name, synopsis, and description

Searching Within a Man Page

• To initiate a search type /
• Press enter to view the first match
• Press n to view the next match
• Press N to view the previous match

Searching The Sections

• To match man pages that have names and a term, you can use the man command with the -f option

$ man -f passwd

• The man command has an option, -k, which takes a keyword as an argument
• Executing man -k keyword will search all the man pages descriptions for the keyword

Using The Info Command

Info Command

• The info command provides documentation of commands and files similar to the man command

Displaying Info Documentation for a Command

• Press h to get help on using the info

Moving Around WHile Viewing an Info Document

Exploring Info Documentation

• Unlike man pages that are sometimes not very easy to read, the info pages are designed to be readable by regular people
• Consider executing simply info to begin the available info documentation
• You may also want to try using pinfo, a more colorful and easier to use version of info

Getting Additional Help

The standard GNU option for documentation is — help. Use to display basic command usage, which is similar to the man page.

Finding Commands and Documentation

The whereis command will display the location of a command executable, as well as its source and documentation, if available.

Find Any File or Directory

The locate command is able to find the file as long as the user has permission to access the containing directory by searching a database of filenames on the system

The Locate Command

• The locate command will match any part of a filename, so locate readme could match a file named abcreadme123
• The -b option for locating allows for a basename search, e.g.: locate -b readme
• The -c option provides a count of the number of matching files: locate -c readme