Linux ‘man’ Command – How to Search and Cycle Through Results

linuxmanunix

When looking for a certain word or phrase in the man page of Linux command, one can type '/' followed by the word or phrase to search for it.

What I'd like to be able to do is to search for the next occurrence of the word or phrase without having to type it out again. Kinda like when you use ctrl+f in a browser to search for a word, and then press enter to find the next occurrence of that word.

If this is possible to do, how do I do it?

Best Answer

Use n and ShiftN for the next and previous matches.

(The default pager used for manual pages is less, which has similar shortcuts to those in the vim text editor.)

Related Solutions

Linux – How to run `less` and have it run a search pattern automatically

From the man page:

   -ppattern or --pattern=pattern
          The  -p  option  on the command line is equivalent to specifying
          +/pattern; that is, it tells less to start at the  first  occur-
          rence of pattern in the file.

This works as expected using the latest version of less (436).

Linux – How to change the default for the “df” command in the Unix/Linux Terminal in the tcsh shell

My df takes a -m flag:

$ df -m
Filesystem                  1M-blocks   Used Available Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2                   380516 311007     69258    82%    /
devfs                               0      0         0   100%    /dev
map -hosts                          0      0         0   100%    /net
map auto_home                       0      0         0   100%    /home
/dev/disk0s3                    96094  42464     53630    45%    /Volumes/BOOTCAMP

You can also use df -h to get 'human-readable' values:

$ df -h
Filesystem                    Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2                 372Gi  304Gi   68Gi    82%    /
devfs                        124Ki  124Ki    0Bi   100%    /dev
map -hosts                     0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%    /net
map auto_home                  0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%    /home
/dev/disk0s3                  94Gi   41Gi   52Gi    45%    /Volumes/BOOTCAMP

You can also set the environment variable BLOCKSIZE to 1M, and save that in your .profile to make it the default.

$ BLOCKSIZE=1M df
Filesystem                  1M-blocks   Used Available Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2                   380516 311008     69257    82%    /
devfs                               0      0         0   100%    /dev
map -hosts                          0      0         0   100%    /net
map auto_home                       0      0         0   100%    /home
/dev/disk0s3                    96094  42464     53630    45%    /Volumes/BOOTCAMP

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – How to run `less` and have it run a search pattern automatically

Linux – How to change the default for the “df” command in the Unix/Linux Terminal in the tcsh shell

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