20250712141752-Linux_Documentation

Linux Documentation

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Linux includes strong, built-in documentation in the form of manual pages, which provide brief explanations of the command, available options, and a few examples. They are short, concise references.

The manual pages are also “referred to as ‘man pages’ for short” (Garn 2022, 20). The “[m]an pages are organized into eight sections,” a section defining “what category the command belongs to” (Ibid). The sections are numbered, such that fsck (8) would indicate that the command fsck is in section eight (Ibid). Section eight is the most commonly used for Linux administrators (Garn 2022, 21).

To access man pages for primary commands in the Linux shell, use the syntax man [command] (Garn 2022, 20). In sum, the man command takes an argument that is, typically, the primary command name. So the syntax is:

man $COMMAND_NAME

An example would be the following for ls (Ibid):

man ls

Once a page for the command has opened up (Garn 2022, 21):

From bib. source

You can use several different keys to navigate through the man pages, all mapped to specific actions.

These keys are (Ibid):

• Home key, to move to the beginning of the man page
• End key, to move to the end of the man page
• Page Up key, to scroll up one page
• Page Down key, to scroll down one page
• The “/”, or forward slash, key, to begin a search for a term or text string
• The “n” key to move to next occurrence of a search hit / result
• The “p” key to move to the previous occurrence of a search hit / result
• The “q” key to exit the man pages and return to the shell

Getting help

In addition to man pages, most commands include help references for different parts and aspects of the those commands, and this is viewed by typing an h or help flag or a help subcommand (Ibid). For example:

cp --help

Or:

ip addr help

Understanding what a command does

On the other hand, to simply get a quick, short summary of what a primary command is supposed to do or allow you to do, precede it by the whatis primary command (Ibid). For example:

whatis cp

Documentation path

There is also a path in Linux wherein documentation may be stored for and by applications, as well as for Linux, this path being: /usr/share/doc (Garn 2022, 22).

Online documentation

Finally, online documentation for Linux can be found at the Linux Documentation Project: https://tldp.org

Documentation for any particular Linux distributions or distros, or any applications used in Linux, can be found by looking for reference repositories of the associated vendors.

manual_pages man_pages documentation primary_command linguistics primary_instruction End_key Home_key Page_Down_key Page_Up_key forward_slash forward_slash_key keyboard command_flag bash bash_script bash_scripting shell_script shell_scripting Bourne_Again_Shell repository vendor application Bourne_Again_Shell_script Bourne_Again_Shell_scripting command_argument command_arguments command_option command_options command_flags command_line command-line command_lines command-lines Linux

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bibliography

• Garn, Damon. The Official CompTIA Linux+ Student Guide (Exam XK0-005). 1.0. Downers Grove, IL: CompTIA, 2022.