Getting Online Help

The manual pages for Unix commands are available online. You can use the man command to access the manual pages. For instance, to read the manual page for the command cd, you would use the command man cd. You can use man tcsh to read about the tcsh shell. To get help regarding the use of the man command itself, type man man. It is often difficult finding useful information on the "man" pages, so don't feel discouraged if you cannot find the information you need.

The above form of the man command is useful if you know the command that you have to use and want to get more detailed information. If you don't know the command you need to use, you can try man with the "-k" option. For instance, let us assume that you want to rename a file but you don't know the command to do it. You could enter the command man -k rename and man would give you a list of commands that it thinks might be useful for you. (Well, if you actually try this example, you'll find that the command you really want to use, mv, is not one of those listed! This is not unusual; unfortunately, man -k often doesn't yield useful results, but it's still worth a try.)

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Last modified: Tue Jan 6 20:43:12 EST 1998