Using Man Pages

To learn more about a command or program, use the man command followed by the name of the command. Man pages are stored in places like /usr/share/man and /usr/local/share/man, but you don’t need to know that. To read a man page, such as the one for the rm command, use the man command like this:

matthew@seymour:~$ man rm

After you press Enter, the less command (a Linux command known as a pager) displays the man page. The less command is a text browser you can use to scroll forward and backward (even sideways) through the document to learn more about the command. Type the letter h to get help, use the forward slash (/) to enter a search string, or press q to quit.

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