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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
29
votes
Is there documentation for chown that is easier to understand?
I suggest installing tldr project:
$ tldr chown
# chown ...
27
votes
Accepted
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 ./ ...
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
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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
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.
?...
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 ...
16
votes
Accepted
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 [,...
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 ...
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 ...
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
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 ...
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 ...
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
...
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/...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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.
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 <...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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