Showing posts with label Help in Linux. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Help in Linux. Show all posts

Understanding Linux man Pages



Understanding Linux Manual (man) Pages


Man pages are the work of various people doing their best to describe the commands and their usage. Man pages come from different sources and most are similar but not all. Manual pages were generally written by the persons who wrote the program themselves. They are descriptive enough but it's not a full documentation. Man pages themselves are broken up into several parts, indicated and organized by heading terms. Most heading terms you will see in man pages are common across different man pages, and will be presented in the same order in each case.

Man pages are the most reliable command for getting help. Man pages are not easy to understand in starting, but when you start reading man pages you will get familiar with it. If you are in doubt how the commands work you can just simply type man command. For getting help how to read man pages you can also type command man man for man page help.



Getting Help in Linux




Getting Help in Linux


There are various methods for getting help in Linux.

For Graphical environment using yelp we can saw these three man pages.

1 GNU Info notes

2 GNOME graphical documentation

3 Linux System Manual (Man Pages)

Yelp is the Gnome help/documentation browser. It is designed to help you browse all the documentation on your system in one central tool.

Command line help:


-h or –-help

If you are not sure how to use the command use –h option after the command. It will show about the command and the different option available for the command.

$ ls -- help