[*] All of the commands in Unix are described online in a collection of files. They are known as man pages because they were originally pages of the UNIX Programmer's Manual. There are eight sections of the man pages:
If you know the name of a command, you can view its man pages by typing[+]
man [section] name
or on some systems
man [-s section] name
A program called apropos[+] is
available for those who don't know the name of the command they want.
The apropos program searches through the header lines of the man
pages for whatever keyword you supply and displays a list of the man
pages containing it. For example,
apropos copy
produces a list of all the man pages that contain copy
in their header lines.
The list will contain commands followed by a number in parentheses, i.e. cp (1). The number in parentheses is the section number. If the section number is omitted when doing a man command, the man program searches through each section until it finds the named man page. This works fine if the name is unique, but a few names exist in more than one section. One example of this is intro. There is an intro man page for each section. Typing man intro would get you the intro man page for the first section, but the only way to get the intro man page for section 5 is to type
man 5 intro
or on some systems
man -s5 intro
When the man pages are being displayed on your terminal, it pauses after
each screen full and displays a -More- on the bottom line. This
give you a chance to read the information before you go on to the next
screen full. Press the space bar to scroll an entire screen forward.