Tip Of The Day
Getting Infomation on Commands
The "info" is a great utility for getting information about the
system.
Here's a quick key on using "info" from the terminal prompt.
'q' exits.
'u' moves up to the table of contents of the current section.
'n' moves to the next chapter.
'p' moves to the previous chapter.
'space' goes into the selected section.
The following is a good starting point:
$ info coreutils
Need to find out what a certain program does?
$ whatis open
open (2) - open and possibly create a file or device
open (3) - perl pragma to set default PerlIO layers for
input and output
open (3pm) - perl pragma to set default PerlIO layers for
input and output
open (n) - Open a file-based or command pipeline channel
To get specific information about the open commmand
$ man 2 open
also try 'keyword' search, which is the same as the apropos
command.
For example, to find all the man pages on selinux, type the
following:
$ man -k selinux
or the man full word search. Same as whatis command.
$ man -f <some string>
This is a hint once you are inside man.
space moves forward one page
b moves backward
y scrolls up one line "yikes, I missed it!"
g goes to the beginning
q quits
/<string> search, repeat seach n
m mark, enter a letter like "a", then, ' to go back
' enter a letter that is marked.
To get section numbers
$ man 8 ping
Note the numbers are used as follows
(This is OpenBSD)
1 General Commands
2 System Calls and Error Numbers
3 C Libraries
3p perl
4 Devices and device drivers
5 File Formats and config files
6 Game instructions
7 Miscellaneous information
8 System maintenance
9 Kernel internals
To find the man page directly, "ls" command:
$ whereis -m ls
ls: /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1
/usr/share/man/man1p/ls.1p
To read this file directly, do the following:
$ man /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz
If you want to know the manpath, execute manpath.
$ manpath
/usr/share/man:/usr/X11R6/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/local/pgsql/man:/usr/man:/usr/local/man
