Where To Find Help

The UNIX system provides on-line manuals for most commands, services, system calls, and other useful material. Most of the time, these on-line manual pages are exactly what you would get if you purchased a copy of the printed manuals for the system, in fact, most UNIX vendors won't even sell you hard-copy manuals anymore. To access the manual pages enter:

man <subject>

This will display manual pages for subject, providing that it exists. Keep in mind that searches done by man are case-sensitive (as are all UNIX commands, filenames, etc. ); a search for ''GCC'' will yield a ''No manual entry'' message, while a search for the command ''gcc'' will open the appropriate manual page.

To look for a command or manual page when you don't know what the command is called, you can do a manual page lookup by keywords found in the command or subject's description.

man -k <keyword>

An alternative way to do the keyword search is with the apropos command, it is equivalent to man with the -k argument:

apropos <keyword>

For information on how to use the man command itself enter:

man man

Sun's and Linux

Pressing <CR> causes the manual pages to scroll one line at a time while <spacebar> scrolls one page at a time. <ctrl-b> returns to the previous page.

SGI's

Pressing <CR> causes the manual pages to scroll one page at a time. Typing -1 returns you to the previous page.

While reading a manual page, you can search for a specific word in the manual by entering a slash (/) followed by the word you wish to locate.

Under X windows you can use the xman menu item, or type xman to get windows based access to manual pages.

Printing a man page is somewhat complicated. First you need to find the man source which will be under /usr/man/man*/* . For example the man page for ls is /usr/man/man1/ls.1v. Copy this file to your home directory:

cp /usr/man/man1/ls.1v  

and then login to a Linux machine, if you aren't already:

rlogin acadia

and run groff on the file:

groff -man -Tps ls.1v > ls.ps

This will create a PostScript version of the man page that you can print on the laser printers in our labs. See the section on printing for more info on how to print.

Also, most Linux systems come with other documentation like FAQ's and howto's under /usr/doc.