On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 6:59 AM, Richard Owlett <[email protected]> wrote:
> Unfortunately I mentioned, as an example, the "particle of > information" that had my attention at the instant. The replies > focused on the particle only (one solved my immediate problem). > When probing for an answer to the general question, the only > response I got was "experience". i'll focus on the "suppose you were offline" aspect, and apply my experience :) 1) hopefully you have some man pages installed, and you have your mandb up to date (methods vary, see the mandb(8) web page, but this is usually automatic), you can use the apropos(1) command like so: apropos keyword or apropos -r '^man' to search all the command names and one-line descriptions provided with any man page. 2) your distro probably stores additional package specific docs somewhere. ubuntu likes /usr/share. You can probably find this location with locate(1), assuming that updatedb(8) is run regularly (or you can of course run it yourself). In case your distro has additional docs, I'd put money on 'locate README' turning up the generic location (you'll find many README's wherever these docs are located). 3) last-ditch desert-island fu. if you remember only a keyword that you saw in a file, you can always try recursively grepping the directory you found in 2 above to see if you turn up the doc you were thinking of: grep -r dealybopper /usr/share This will take a hot minute, and requires a fairly unique keyword, but sometimes i can remember "yeah, their examples used foobar.com" or something similarly standout. can also be used on your man page directory to search for things not in the command name or short description (my man pages are in /usr/share/man, so the above hits them anyway, but yours might be elsewhere, and you may want to include /usr/local in your searches) 4) make note of any additional documentation systems your distro might include. redhat used to have their full installation, etc, manuals installed in html, which also made for good grep'ing. Many of the commercial unices and maybe SuSE have a gui-searchable documentation set that is even more thorough than man pages. A lot of this kind of documentation is not installed by default, but might be worth your while to install if you see yourself reading a lot. > I was looking for something like the many essays on "Asking good > questions". I only refer people to this essay, in that category: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
