Small, Sharp Software Tools

Read the Friendly Manual

Provided your operating system hasn’t been set up by a sinister monster of a system administrator, the documentation for the commands you’re learning is available to you thanks to the man command, which is shorthand for “manual.” For example, you’ve played around with the echo command a little, so type the following command to learn more about echo:

$ man echo

You’ll see what the program does, along with its options. In some cases, you might even see some example usage.

Press q to return to your prompt.

Some commands you use, like cd, don’t have their own man page, as they are “built-in” commands. You can see those with man builtins.

You’re just about done with your introductory tour, but before we wrap up, ...