The responses to these general questions have been very good, but I would
like to add one thing. "man" is not the only way to get infotmation about
system comands. There are three alternatives:
1. "info" -- GNU is trying to wean us away from the man system in favor of
its own info system. Whether this will work or not is uncertain, mainly
because the info system is designed to work best in conjunction with emacs,
and not all of us love or use emacs. But increasingly "info" is the only way
to get up-to-date information on GNU packages. So if "man something" is
unproductive, try "info something" and see if you have better luck.
2. The HowTos and miniHowTos. Online at Linux Documentation Project and
usually on Linux systems somewhere in /usr/doc (location differes between
distributions and versions), these provides more extended guidence about
some tasks.
3. Uncategorizable documents. Some commands don't have man pages, but they
have non-standard documentation. Debian tries to put such stuff in /usr/doc;
I don't know where other dirstirubtions do it.
At 04:10 PM 9/6/99 +1000, MURRAY, Paul wrote [in part]:
>The documentation command is "man". Stands for "man(ual)". Try it. You must
>specify a topic.
> man man
> man fstab
> man ls
> man rpm
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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