On Tuesday 05 September 2006 12:35, Andrew Errington wrote: > > > how do I go about pinging that address please?? > > <snip> > > > what's the problem in using the manual? > > > > man ping > > The problem is you have to know what the command is before looking it up. > > In this case 'pinging' is the action, 'ping' is the command, and indeed it > is obvious, but for other commands you will agree it is not always so. Indeed.
That is the purpose of the -k option to the man command or indeed the -K option which respectively search the NAME line in the manual page or the whole text. Alternatively one can use the apropos command. man man and man apropos for the concentrated juice. However, I'd agree that the output from the apropos commands leaves a _lot_ to be desired, however the manual pages themselves have improved out of all recognition recently, particularly since the X/Open organisation allowed Linux distributors to use the 'real thing' pages. Piping the output from apropos through an egrep filter which selects only those command in books one or eight - respectively, the user and administrator CLI commands - of the manual makes for a much better signal to noise ratio. vis:- apropos copy | egrep "\([18]\)" On the other hand one could always use the # in the Konqueror's Location bar which presents the whole manual as if it was a web site. Yes, the output sometimes does need translating into 'Plain English' :-) -- CS
