Stupid question of the year, man!!! 1

[Cadwalader]

Wow, there is no way I can ask this with out sounding like a total lamer...but here goes...

what is the syntax for the man pages?

like at the bash:
[root@localhost.localdomain root]# man
What manual page do you want?
[root@localhost.localdomain root]# man 1
What manual page do you want from section 1?

So I thought I'd get smart....
[root@localhost.localdomain root]# man 1.1
What manual page do you want from section 1.1?

Darn!!!
Again....

[root@localhost.localdomain root]# man 1 page 1
No entry for page in section 1 of the manual

help? I can't find anything on the Internet for this, not for the text only servers.
Hope I was of some help...
--OR--
Thanks for the help...
--Rich

 

[w1nn3r]

No stupid questions my friend, its: man <command>

everyone will tell you to type: man man

But you can do: man httpd
man traceroute
man ping
etc....

If you have any other questions feel free to ask.

 

[Cadwalader]

Wow...thamks. I think I can fingure it all out from here. That is exactly what I needed to know.... Hope I was of some help...
--OR--
Thanks for the help...
--Rich

 

[verland]

Is there more to it then that? Sometimes I'll be reading something (say, man httpd.conf) and at that bottom it'll read &quot;see also httpd.conf(11)&quot; or something. That's a lousy example but anyone know what it means?

 

[Stingreen]

When I was new in this linux thing , I was wondering how to send mail, right?
Then I asked this question in linuxquestions.org forum and one said, I should execute this command.

# man sendmail

well, As far as I'm the master newbie in the linux world, I personally interpreted that into,

man! please send my mail!!!

I thought he was making joke of me, what else I should be thinking, right ?

Could you believe how lamer I was back then ???

 

[Norwich]

There are various sections of man pages. 1 is regular use commands, 8 is administration commands etc - see &quot;man man&quot;.

It is possible that the term being searched for may be in multiple sections - eg &quot;passwd&quot; - try &quot;man passwd&quot; to get the page for the passwd command - I think the search is from sections 1 to 7 or starting with 8 if you are logged on as the administrator. However, there is also a passwd file format page which can be obtained with &quot;man 5 passwd&quot;.

Hope this makes sense.

 

[KenCunningham]

You can also use man -k <word>| pg to discover whether any of the man pages refer to a particular word. Be warned that there are some pretty esoteric variations in there though! Good luck.

 

[fluid11]

You can do the same thing as KenCunningham said by running....

apropos 'command'



ChrisP

 

[marsd]

Some distros use whatis as well:
mars@skag:~ > whatis ifconfig
ifconfig (8) - configure a network interface

 

[RhythmAce]

info man