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Running Mac OS X Tiger
book

Running Mac OS X Tiger

by Jason Deraleau, James Duncan Davidson
December 2005
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
400 pages
11h 33m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Running Mac OS X Tiger

Getting Help

The bash shell provides a help command that will give information about all its built-in commands. Example 4-13 shows how to get information about the alias command.

Example 4-13. Getting help for alias

$ help alias
alias: alias [-p] [name[=value] ... ]
'alias' with no arguments or with the -p option prints the list
of aliases in the form alias NAME=VALUE on standard output.
Otherwise, an alias is defined for each NAME whose VALUE is given.
A trailing space in VALUE causes the next word to be checked for
alias substitution when the alias is expanded. Alias returns
true unless a NAME is given for which no alias has been defined.

If you want to get a list of commands that help can help you with, use the command by itself.

To get help about any other command in the Unix shell, use man , the all-purpose, Swiss Army knife for getting information for most commands on the system in a form known as a manpage. For example, to see the manpage for man, type the following:

$ man man

When you execute this command, you’ll see the output shown in Figure 4-4. Notice that there’s a colon (:) at the bottom of the window with the cursor next to it. This indicates that there’s more content to be seen in the manpage. At the prompt, you can:

  • Hit the spacebar or the F key to page down.

  • Hit the B key to go back a page.

  • Type a / (slash) followed by a word to search forward for that word.

  • Hit the Q key to quit.

When you quit out of viewing a manpage, the information goes away and you are left with the ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596009135Catalog PageErrata