Chapter 4: Getting Help

Commands:

Command Description Examples
man The man command displays information from the reference manuals. It displays complete manual pages that you select by name, or one-line summaries if selected by keyword -s, -k

$ man man

$ man cd

ls For each file that is a directory, ls lists the contents of the directory; for each file that is an ordinary file, ls repeats its name and any other information requested. -a,-F,-l,-lt,-ld,-E

$ ls
dante   dir1   dir3

$ ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x  1  user2  staff  110 Apr 19  dante
drwxr-xr-x  5  user2  staff  110 Apr 19  dir1
drwxr-xr-x  4  user2  staff  110 Apr 19  dir3

pwd pwd writes an absolute path name of the current working directory to standard output $ pwd
/home/user2/dir1
whatis whatis looks up a given command and displays the header line from the manual section $ whatis cd
cd    cd (1)   -change working directory