Man and Info

Man and Info Pages

There are two ways to get the information and options of various commands and configuration files and their options of use in linux.

a)      man pages

b)      info pages

Out of these two the info pages are more well organized whereas the man pages have all the information in one long page.

Lets get started with the man pages so Type :

$man ls

You will get into the man page for the ls command we learned before after a description of the command you will also find certain options for this command

You will note the option –a and this options for ls is to show you the files that start with a “.” (These are normally user configuration files and are keeping a track of your experience on the system or what we would say is user level experience)

You can search through the man pages as well

While viewing the man pages type: /file and hit enter this will take you to the first instance of the word file type n on the keyboard and that shows you the next instance of the word file in the man page(man pages are build on vi editor and so the search is the same as you would do in a vi text editor)

Lets quit the man page for ls and the way to do that is by typing “q”

Also try to get info on ls by typing

$info ls

You will note that this is more organized and there is a better description of the commands

ctrl+s you can search through the info pages and ctrl+g you can quit the search option on info pages.

Now even though a person has knowledge about the man and info pages how would someone get into the manual pages if the command is not known.

Lets learn a way to find out the command related to a particular file type. Type the following on the command prompt:

$man –k jpg

This will show you command that work on the file type jpg and will show command that either have jpg in their names or in their description.. There is another way that I would like to discuss, just type:

$apropos jpeg

Again this will show you the command that have jpeg in the name or in the description of the command

At the end I would like to say that man and info pages are good for increasing your know how on a particular command and its various options, man pages are for experienced users I would prefer less experienced users to check the info pages as they have more description of the command .