2.1. Manual (“man”) pages[16]

You can start learning about the man pages by typing man intro or man man at the shell prompt.[17] The man pages’ help (which you can find by typing h while reading a man page) will give you the full list of navigation commands, but to start, you can scroll along a man page using b for back, f for forward, < to jump to the start of the man page, and > to jump to the end, typing q to quit. It is always worth checking the man pages when you are faced with an unfamiliar command or when you want to learn more about a command than you already know.

As mentioned in Section A.2.1, “General Linux resources”, a list of Web-based repositories of Linux manual pages can be found in the Wikipedia article on Unix manual pages.



[16] A historical note: as explained in an article from Wikipedia, the idea of built-in manual pages dates back to the original Unix operating system from Bell Labs.


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