When I open up the manual for a command (man wget
for example) the manual can be many hundreds of lines long. How can I get:
- to the end of the manual quickly and
- back to my terminal prompt?
When inside of the document viewer through the man command, press h or H in order to view the man's help.
From man's help screen:
JUMPING
g < ESC-< * Go to first line in file (or line N).
G > ESC-> * Go to last line in file (or line N).
p % * Go to beginning of file (or N percent into file).
Another good idea would be to press the Home or the End keys. :)
Good luck!
man bash
interface, when I hit g
and G
I got to the top or the bottom, respectively. What does the < ESC-<
part mean? I can type g
then 7
then <enter>
and it takes me to line 7, which is "line N" in the instructions but I couldn't tell you what made me try g 7 <enter>
to get to line 7. p 50 <enter>
does take me to what I believe to be half-way through the document so I guess I understand some of it but what's < ESC-<
all about?
Jun 28, 2022 at 19:45
The normal ways to do this have been suggested (see @geppettvs-dconstanzo's answer). This leaves numerous unnatural, wrong, and bad ways.
So I'll deal with a couple of those.
First, you don't have to read the man pages from a terminal (even though it will make you a better person). You can read them in html, for instance.
You can generate the html yourself from the sources on your system, but it's easier to go to manpages.ubuntu.com .
Here's the hefty bash
page, turned into light and fluffy web-renderable html :
The Bash Manpage from manpages.ubuntu.com
Here's a hack that can actually be useful : use tail
to slice off some number of lines from the end of the man page output, and view that.
Least usefully, most trivally:
man bash | tail -100
might be useful :
man bash | tail -1500 | more
(or man bash | tail -1500 | less
)
More useful (if contrived):
$ man bash | wc -l # how many lines are in the man-page?
5375
$ man bash | tail -2600 | less # jump to the middle of the output
Of course, this is what I'd do:
man tac | tac | less
(Although you might start out reading man tac
forwards.)
Some handy easy-to-remember less (and thus man) commands:
Hope that helps (:
Press G
Press q
You can type man less
to get more information.