Practical Linux

Getting Help

Linux distributions include documentation about nearly all the programs, commands, and files installed on your hard drive. Each distribution also comes with a number of commands and programs designed to help you learn about your system. These commands are discussed in the following sections.

Getting Help with the man Command

The man command is used to display help, or documentation called manual pages, about a command, file, or other Linux function. To read a manual page, specify a program name on the command line. To learn about the man command, follow it with the word man, like so:

$ man man

The man pages are displayed using an application called less. Manual pages (sometimes called man pages) are text files written using ...