Read System Documentation

Linux offers lots of commands making it challenging to remember them all without help or documentation. For instance while using the long listing format command you might want to ensure you see all options. You can enter:

We can see that by entering ls –help, it directs us to the -a option

which will return the results we are looking for.

Manual Pages

The signifigant commands in Linux come with their own manual “man” pages. To access a command’s manual type:

This will display the name, synopsis and description of how the command works.

Using apropos to find commands

The “apropos” command searches one line summaries of man pages for the keywords you provide.

The works well when you can only remember part of the command but not sure of the complete name, maybe you can only come with a related term.

For example, you are looking for man pages relating to directories, you could enter:

By entering “director” this allows flexibility in the search to return entries, directory & directories.

The second entry displays “director: nothing appropriate”. The apropos command runs on a database that must be refreshed regularly, if not the “nothing apropropiate” message can appear. You update the database with

Manual Page for Man pages

There is even a man page for the actual manual pages documentation, this covers the structure of man pages as a whole.

After the description some man pages are broken down in sections.