I am looking forward to mastering linux. I have been repeatedly told to refer to man pages when you are in doubt.
Though I am very comfortable with the commandline, I find it very difficult to quickly and efficiently use man to find help with commands. Hence I end up googling up how to get things done. It is even more painful when the system I am using does not have internet access and I have to walk back to my office to get help from the internet.
How does one master man pages? What are the most common tricks that can be used to quickly get whatever you want from the man page? What are the most commonly used keyboard shortcuts?
Best Answer
Manual pages are essentially glorified help files. Their goal is to explain what programs do, and how to alter what they do through command-line flags and arguments.
If you look at the
SYNOPSISandOPTIONSsections of manpages, you will typically be able to understand enough about what your program does.Don't allow the "technical" wording of manpages to throw you off -- they were typically written by developers in a developer mindset. The more you read/use them, the better you'll get and the more you'll develop your own tricks to using
man.If you press the h key in
man, you can get a lot of useful keyboard shortcuts (and general help) that will make your browsing (hopefully) faster. They're similar to the keystrokes forless, so it's essentially a 2-for-1.And, you can always refer to the manpage for
man(man man) to get a quick rundown ofman. You can't breakmantoo badly, so just feel free to experiment and try out things.