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In this segment, Felix is going to introduce you to The Linux Manual. The man page is a form of software documentation that is found on Unix or Unix-like operating system. Topics covered include programs (including library and system calls, formal standards and conventions, and even abstract concepts. It’s a command line program that opens up a text document which provides usage of commands. |
The manual pages provide a text description of every command available on your system including what they do, how to run them, and what command line arguments they accept. Keep in mind, the manual page has to actually be written and installed on the machine in order to view it. To read a manual page for a Unix command, a user can type:
man <command_name>
You can search for keywords on a man page by using the following command:
Man –k
Few alternatives to man have enjoyed much popularity, with the possible exception of GNU Project's "info" system, an early and simple hypertext system. In addition, some Unix GUI applications (particularly those built using the GNOME and KDE development environments) now provide end-user documentation in HTML and include embedded HTML viewers such as yelp for reading the help within the application. Man pages are usually written in English, but translations into other languages may be available on the system. The default format of the man pages is troff, with either the macro package man (appearance oriented) or mdoc (semantic oriented). This makes it possible to typeset a man page into PostScript, PDF, and various other formats for viewing or printing. Most Unix systems have a package for the man2html command, which enables users to browse their man pages using an html browser (textproc/man2html on FreeBSD or man on some Linux distribution).
