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Need help figuring out what a command is supposed to do? In an operating system with strange-sounding commands like awk, grep, and sed, it's not surprising. The man command (short for manual) is a source of online help for most Linux commands . For example, you can enter
to learn all the secrets of the very useful grep command. (For a summary of the most-used Li nux commands, see the section "Important Linux Commands").
If man claims no knowledge of the command in which you're interested, try help instead. This command will list all the built-in bash commands with a brief syntax summary.
Another help format called info is more powerful, since it provides hypertext links to make reading large documents much easier, but not all documentation is available in info format. T here are some very complete info documents on various aspects of Red Hat (especially the portions from the GNU project).
To try it out, use the info command without any arguments. It will present you with a list o f available documentation. Press h to read the help for first-time users, or use the tab key to move the cursor to a topic link and then press enter to follow the link. Pressing p returns you t o the previous page, n moves you to the next page, and u goes up one level of documentation. To exit info, press q< /STRONG>.
For more information on the man command, see the man manual.
Previous Lesson: Environment Variables
Next Lesson: The Linux File System
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