11: Man pages

  Wurm lab

If every Unix command has so many options, you might be wondering how you find out what they are and what they do. Well, thankfully every Unix command has an associated ‘manual’ that you can access by using the man command. E.g.

man ls
man cd
man man # yes even the man command has a manual page

When you are using the man command, press space to scroll down a page, b to go back a page, or q to quit. You can also use the up and down arrows to scroll a line at a time. The man command is actually using another Unix program, a text viewer called less, which we’ll come to later on.