Time and time again. I have been asked how to use a particular command or how can they confirm what options they need to do a particular task in Linux/Unix. The simple answer is the ‘man‘ command.
This command is short for manual and can give you pages of information of commands you want to know about and what options are available to be used with that command. Even before I use any well known commands I tend to use the ‘man‘ command to make sure what I am doing is correct. This helps to reduce costly and stupid mistakes.
The ‘man‘ command is simple to use. All you do is type man and what command you would like to know about like this ‘man command‘. I have provided a short example of using the man command to show the use of ‘ls‘ command. The output shown in the below screen shot is what is commonly known as a ‘man page‘.
