7 secret practices of “man” command to unlock your hidden Linux potential

Gone are the days when printed out-of-band manuals were the norm. The man page of Linux or Unix like systems are the savior for everyone now, be it the newbie or the senior most guy. But are you using the man command in right way? let’s explore more on man command and expand our efficiency.

let’s do something interesting

So, What is “Man page” ?

The man pages are the online manual of software documentation. Generally It covers the gist or crisp description of common conventions, formal standards of programs and their usage including the system calls or libraries. These are very useful for getting insights for commands in Unix like systems. In short, you open your console and just type man before any command (say man) and Bingo! You will have the all sorts of info.

1. Manual of man itself

$ man man

The above command produces the following output. However, as you can see there are other options available as well which makes you efficient in your job.

what man has to say about man

Let’s see few of the commands that supercharges your admin skill.

2. Manual of any command

Let’s see what man has to say

# man $(command)

# man whoami

3. Tell me in One Line ?

If you want to have just shortest description type the following.

# whatis $(command)

Output :

That’s all

4. Now Tell me the location of the command.

The command extracts the location

# whereis $(command)

Where is this whereis?

5. What about the config Files?

Many config files have the manual as well.

# man $(filename.conf)

# man adduser.conf

6. Daemon information as well.

# man $(deamon-name.d)

man dockerd

7. How do you know if you don’t know?

yes! sometimes we don’t even know what commands are available? how to use them? the apropos command will find it for you from man page, all the matching results and you can filter out from them. suppose we don’t know what are the commands for compress?

# apropos -e compress  //-e for exact search the term "compress"
# zip --help    //to find everything on zip

All commands for compress

pick any choice and seek help

There are other associated options also available. One of them is mandb. I encourage you to explore what is mandb and the usage. I hope now you can find it in your terminal only and learn on the commands. Do comment if you think i have missed something. have a good day/night!