Ten Steps to Linux Survival

Chapter 10. Step 10: Where to Go for Help

This report is just a quick flyover of Linux commands and how to use them to do quick troubleshooting. Even with the commands covered in the report, I excluded many, many options to keep it simple. But sometimes, even in the heat of troubleshooting a system problem, you need a bit more help. This chapter covers where you can go to get it.

Hey, man

The man (manual page) command provides documentation on commands, system configuration files, and much more. This command is good for when you can’t access the Internet, or doing so isn’t convenient because you are on a machine console or similar setup. Figure 10-1 shows the first page of output from man reboot.

Figure 10-1. man command

The output is run through pagination similar to less, so all its navigation and find commands will work. You can, of course, find out more about how to use man by running man man.

Is That apropos?

How do you know what you don’t know? Sometimes you might not know (or remember) the name of a command. For example, you may recall that this guide mentioned disk space, but can’t remember the actual commands. Luckily, you can use the apropos command to jog your memory, as shown in Figure 10-2.

Figure 10-2. apropos command

The apropos command is simple. All it does is ...