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49 votes
Accepted

How can I get help on terminal commands?

What is a man page? A man page (short for manual page) is the traditional form of software documentation on a Unix-like OS like Ubuntu. For the vast majority of commands and programs there's a man ...
dessert's user avatar
  • 40k
33 votes

How do I access that basic command line tutorial man document?

You are looking for the man intro. Just type man intro This will open the first man intro section, the one that you are (I will stab a guess) most likely interested in. To view all man intro ...
Prashant Morgenstern's user avatar
30 votes
Accepted

Is there documentation for chown that is easier to understand?

Actually there is such documentation. Open a command line terminal - CtrlAltT and enter: info chown you will find this document uses less technical terms and phrasing, and explains the command in a ...
jordy's user avatar
  • 1,670
29 votes

Is there documentation for chown that is easier to understand?

I suggest installing tldr project: $ tldr chown # chown ...
Nykakin's user avatar
  • 3,744
27 votes
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How to open .8 file with man?

man ./named.8 will work. man will take a filename as an argument, but if the argument "looks like" the name of a manpage, it will assume that it is, and not check for a file of that name. By adding ./ ...
hobbs's user avatar
  • 1,128
19 votes

How to open .8 file with man?

You can open a local file named.8 using the following command: man -l named.8 Reference: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/man.1.html
Lok Lam Cheng's user avatar
19 votes

How do I get a readable printed copy of a man page

You can output the manpage in html using command options. example to view the manpage for nano: man --html=firefox nano use: man --help for more information. Note that you must have the groff ...
mchid's user avatar
  • 43.4k
18 votes

How can I search within a manpage?

Minor appendix to the excellent answer from Stefano: man uses less when no other pager specified. So you can search either with / or with ?. If you search with / then you search forward and you use ...
prosti's user avatar
  • 1,017
18 votes

How to search for all the man files that contain certain keyword?

From man man: -K, --global-apropos Search for text in all manual pages. This is a brute-force search, and is likely to take some time; if you can, you should specify a ...
muru's user avatar
  • 197k
18 votes

How do I get a readable printed copy of a man page

For a PDF: man -t psql > psql.ps ps2pdf psql.ps
flndr's user avatar
  • 301
17 votes
Accepted

How do I search for `!` (exclamation mark) in a manual page?

The default man pager is less. If you look at less's help (press h while in it), you'll see: SEARCHING /pattern * Search forward for (N-th) matching line. ?...
muru's user avatar
  • 197k
16 votes
Accepted

How can I view man pages for apps installed via snaps?

A 'band-aid' solution is to run the following from the command line: export MANPATH=":/snap/tmux/current/share/man" and then the command man tmux will work as well as all of your pre-exisiting man ...
andrew.46's user avatar
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16 votes
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Meaning of curly Braces in Manpages

Command syntax is given in a form that is a bit like Backus-Naur notation, described here. The braces group together two or more options, one of which must be specified. In the case of -I { keyword [,...
Jos's user avatar
  • 29.1k
16 votes
Accepted

Why aren't there any man pages for disown or other Ubuntu commands?

disown is a bash built in. So man bash will show ... disown [-ar] [-h] [jobspec ...] Without options, remove each jobspec from the table of active jobs. If jobspec is not ...
Rinzwind's user avatar
  • 299k
15 votes

How can I get help on terminal commands?

The basics have been covered already, but one website I think is quite helpful for telling you what a command does is https://explainshell.com, which breaks down a command into its sections and shows ...
Qwertie's user avatar
  • 886
15 votes
Accepted

man pages broken after dist-upgrade

The following commands worked for me: apt install apparmor-utils aa-disable /usr/bin/man Upstream Bug: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=889617
nithal's user avatar
  • 166
13 votes

How can I get help on terminal commands?

What is an info page? Alongside man program-name there is often also info program-name Sometimes they are the same (duplicates), but sometimes one of these pages contains more information. For ...
sudodus's user avatar
  • 46.2k
13 votes

How can I get help on terminal commands?

What is the help command? help displays helpful information about bash built-in commands. It provides help for bash shell commands only. You can use type to determine whether a command is such a ...
sudodus's user avatar
  • 46.2k
13 votes

How to find required information in man

Search the man page by pressing / and the search string man is using the viewer less by default. You can search in less by pressing / (slash), and then add the search string, in your example -Idir ...
sudodus's user avatar
  • 46.2k
12 votes
Accepted

How to search for all the man files that contain certain keyword?

This command will show you the filenames of man files that contain the keyword Stallman: zgrep -l Stallman /usr/share/man/man?/* Output in my 15.10 begins with: /usr/share/man/man1/cat.1.gz /usr/...
philsf's user avatar
  • 854
12 votes

Why aren't there any man pages for disown or other Ubuntu commands?

When you type help you see the commands that are built in bash. To see help for these commands type help <command>: help ulimit help disown When you use man (short for manual), you display ...
nobody's user avatar
  • 4,362
10 votes

Meaning of curly Braces in Manpages

Square braces [...] mean that their content is optional and can either be added to the command or not. Curly brackets containing pipe-separated items { ... | ... } mean that you must specify one of ...
Byte Commander's user avatar
  • 107k
10 votes
Accepted

Why can't I find any manpages?

I guess something is wrong with your manual pages caches, run: sudo mandb to update it, if it does not exist on your system it's going to be created. You can also use sudo mandb -c to fore the ...
Ravexina's user avatar
  • 55.6k
10 votes

Permission denied every installing/ removing pack

You need to set owner of directory /var/cache/man/ to usr man. This is the command: chown -R man: /var/cache/man/ and for security set the permission 755 (owner RWX, group RX, other RX) to all ...
aLexX's user avatar
  • 101
9 votes

How do I search for `!` (exclamation mark) in a manual page?

You need to type \ before you type !, so that it will not be interpreted as a negation regular expression in search.
Marcelo Ventura's user avatar
9 votes

How to get paragraph for certain option of command right away?

Type a forward slash, the thing you are searching for, and then press enter. You will jump to the first occurrence. Press N to move to next occurrence and B to go back. So, in this case: /-f <...
James's user avatar
  • 1,083
9 votes
Accepted

man pages - How to always show total lines and percentage in the bottom status / prompt line

Presumably, you are using less as the pager. You can not do what you want directly without recompiling less (at least i am not finding any such option) -- to read all the lines at first, get the end ...
heemayl's user avatar
  • 91.6k
8 votes

How can I search within a manpage?

If you are already in the man page, / search is easy to use, but I prefer to specify my search word with the man command, so it opens directly on the first occurrence of the term. This is fairly ...
Amit Naidu's user avatar
8 votes

How to get color man pages under fish shell?

If you want these colors to be added only when viewing man pages, not for everything you view in less, you should set these variables in a wrapper function for man instead of putting them in your ...
Rory O'Kane's user avatar
8 votes

How to launch google-chrome/chromium application shortcut in fullscreen/kiosk mode

In my case only --kiosk didn't help that much because I wanted to run in app mode (--app=URL) -- which disables some distractions like navbar or bookmarks. I've found from Peter Beverloo's link in ...
Matheus Santana's user avatar

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