The most referenced and most often used command on any Linux distribution is
man, which lets users read the manual pages of other commands. Here are a
couple of less well-known but useful commands that let you bookmark a position
within a man page, and test a command you read from the man page without
closing the page.
Trick #1: Bookmarking Man uses the less utility to display the manual
pages on your screen. When reading through a lengthy man page, I often forget
an interesting fact if I don't make a note of it somewhere before moving on to
reading the rest of the man page. In such a scenario you can create a bookmark
within the man page.
While reading through a man page, you can press m followed by any letter to
mark a position in the page. You can then return to this position in the page
from anywhere by typing ' (single quote) followed by that letter. You can mark
multiple positions within a man page by using a different letter to mark each
position. You can use only use alphabet characters to mark a position within
the man page, but contrary to what the man page for less suggests, you can use
capital letters as well as lower case. For example, you can mark a position
with the letter w and mark an entirely different one with W.
The marked positions are remembered for only the current session, which means
that as soon as you close the man page, the marked positions are lost. Also, if
you accidentally use the same letter to mark two positions, only the most
recently marked position is marked.
Suppose you jumped from marked position a to marked position q, a distance of
10 lines. You next jumped from this position to another position t 30 lines
away, then jumped to a position p 5 lines away. When you now type '' (two
single quotes) you will jump to the position where you had traveled the most
lines. That is, you'll end up at position t, since you had traveled the most,
30 lines, to get there.
Since man uses less to display man pages, you can also use the bookmarking
trick to mark positions in any file you read using less.
Trick #2: Testing commands from within man Another useful man trick is to
press ! whenever you wish to test a command you've just read in the man page.
This allows you to execute the command without closing the man page or opening
another terminal window. Once you've tested the command, press the Enter key
and you'll be dropped back to where you were in the man page.
Again, this works because man uses less to display the man pages. The
commands used in less, as described in its man page, are based on both the more
utility and the vi text editor. The exclamation trick can also be used from
within vi. Try it yourself: open a file in vi, then press : followed by ! and
type ls -l.
The exclamation mark trick makes life easier by reducing the number of clicks
or key-presses it would require to otherwise test a command and then return to
the man page.
---------------------------------
Save all your chat conversations. Find them online.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
