How to jump to the end of a 'man' page

Question

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?

Answer 1

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!

Answer 2

• Press G

• Press q

You can type man less to get more information.

Answer 3

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.

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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

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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

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Of course, this is what I'd do:

man tac | tac | less

(Although you might start out reading man tac forwards.)

Answer 4

Some handy easy-to-remember less (and thus man) commands:

• > takes you to the end of the file
• < takes you back to the beginning
• q exits less / man (as noted by @Kwinto)
• / initiates typing a search term:
  • press enter to start searching
  • if you press enter immediately, it searches for the next occurrence of the last entered search term
  • n also searches (forward) to the next occurrence
  • N searches backwards to the previous occurrence

Hope that helps (: