One of the easiest ways to find out how to use many commands and 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 are new to Linux, you might not find man pages as useful as
someone who is more accustomed to their terse delivery of
information. But man pages can provide information on how 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:
You can quickly access a man page for a particular page by typing
man followed by a space and any command at a
shell prompt. For example, type man su and the
man page for the su command appears.
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:
to display the manual page (as shown in Figure 10-1).
For more advanced information on man pages, see the Official Red Hat Linux Reference Guide.
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).
To print a man page, you need to remove 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:
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 the section called More Basic Commands for Reading Text Files.
 | Use a User Account |
|---|
| | Remember, it can be dangerous to work in the root account unless you
really need to. If you didn't create your user account at the time
of your Red Hat Linux installation and you haven't done so yet, please do so
now. Turn to the section called Creating a user account in Chapter 1 if you need
assistance on how to create your user account.
|
