Unix Third Edition: Visual Quickstart Guide

Getting Help with man

Occasionally, you may need a bit of help remembering what a particular command does. Using man (which is short for “manual”), you can look up information about commands and get pointers for using them efficiently. Figure 1.9 shows a Unix help page (also called a man page, for obvious reasons) for passwords. In the following steps, we’ll show you how to look up specific Unix commands and find related topics.

Figure 1.9. Using man passwd, you can access the standard man file about the passwd program.

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To access a man page:

• man passwd

  At the prompt, type man plus the name of the command you want help ...