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Vadim Motorine's Ideas Blog Sun, 23 Sep 2007 Well this notes rather for people who knows Microsoft Windows and would like to try Linux. When I decided to do this my first question was where is the help? Now I am sure that the help is the man command. Of course nowadays you may find the detailed help in the menu of the UNIX/LNUX desktop applications but even in this case the most up-to-date and reliable information is in man. Detailed helps are often obsolete. It is the philosophy. It is UNIX, so there is just one unique way to start getting help. So always start with the man. It will direct you to more detailed help if necessary. Other ways also exist but often don’t work properly. Man is the most reliable. As distinct from Windows, where any application has its separate help, in Linux man works for all cases. It is help for Linux, any application, shell command, the function from the computer library etc. One caveat, until you install the application, library etc you may have no page for it in the man. Just after you install something you sometimes need to issue command mandb to update man database. Man is usually short but often has the link to more comprehensive document or the site. On the other hands, even if the program had its own html/ doxygen/ info/ pdf/ … help, in man you find the reference for these more detailed documents. So the most often command I use now are
man –k
And of course you always may ask man about itself.
man man
Unix and Linux also sometimes have the detailed help in the form of the info pages. In this case you will find the link to these info pages in man. To my taste the native info browser is very inconvenient. It is certainly not “UNIX” way to use the info browser when everyone now uses the html browsers.
Fortunately you may see the info pages via the html like help browser embedded in the Gnome desktop. Start with the keyword search in the Gnome desktop help. You may also find man pages this way but the search not always reliable so it is better to use man –k command.
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