A Good "Man" Is Easy to Find
As you investigate your new system, you're bound to have questions about commands and system services. One of the easiest ways to find out about how to use many commands or some applications is through the man command.
The word man stands for "manual," a series of online "pages" which can tell you the purpose of many commands. In a highly condensed format, man pages provide a summary of a command's purpose, the options available and the syntax which is used to issue the command.
If you count yourself among the "newbies" to Linux, you might not find man pages as useful as someone who's more accustomed to their terse delivery of information. But man pages can help steer you toward the proper way to use commands on your system. Even at this point, you can gain insight into your system by familiarizing yourself with the man pages. You'll certainly want to know how to use them eventually.
There are several ways to view the man pages in a graphical presentation:
from the GNOME help browser (see the section called Finding Help in Chapter 2)
from the KDE help browser ( see the section called Finding Help in Chapter 3)
from an application called xman at the shell prompt
Often, you can quickly access a man page from the shell prompt by typing:
man pagename |
To scroll forward through the document, press Space; to scroll back, press B. To quit the document, press Q.
Of course, like any good help system, the man command has its own man page. At the prompt, type
man man |
to display the manual page (as shown in Figure 12-2).
If you want to print:
Sometimes, just viewing the man page on the screen isn't enough; you may want to have a printed copy in front of you. Although you could send the page to a printer, because of certain text formatting in the man pages, you could end up with a document filled with "garbage," symbols which didn't translate from your screen to the printer.
Before you print, then, you may have to "strip" the formatting from the page, which you can do with the col command. (As you might guess, there's a man page for col, also.)
For example, to print a man page for the man, type:
man man | col -b | lpr |
In detail, the above command "sends" the output of the manual page entry through the col filter, which helps format the output for the printer. Then, the output from col is sent to the printer. This is called piping, and you can learn more about it in Chapter 13.