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3. The Online Manual

3.1. The Manual

Once, in the early days of UNIX, users had the standard manuals available in print, on their shelves. 9 books were available, each one gigantic and hard to use. Someone eventually had the idea to make it standard to have all of these books on the UNIX system in the form of the man command, where it could be edited easily when new information became available, not to mention the added ease of having the manuals searchable and read quickly. These manuals are usually your first target when you have a problem, as nearly every aspect of your system is covered there.

Not only are most commands covered in the online manual, but often configuration files as well as functions for programming in Linux can be found. However, many users feel intimidated by man pages because they are often technical in nature and can be difficult to read for newbies. Once you get the hang of reading them, you'll find that the man pages are the greatest source of help on any system.

3.2. Man Page Layout

Manual pages have a very specific format that every official page should follow. Here is a sample, the documentation for the uname command. To read it, I type:

bash$ man uname
uname(1)					uname(1)

NAME
	uname - print system information

SYNOPSIS
	uname [OPTION]...

DESCRIPTION
	Print certain system information. With no OPTION, same as -s.

	-a, --all
		print all information

	-m, --machine
		print the machine (hardware) type

	[...]

	-v	print the operating system version

	--help	display this help and exit

	--version
		output version information and exit

AUTHOR
	Written by David MacKenzie.

REPORTING BUGS
	Report bugs to <bug-sh-utils@gnu.org>.

COPYRIGHT
	Copyright C 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
	[...]

SEE ALSO
	The full documentation for uname is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info 
	and uname programs are properly installed at your site, the command

	info uname

should give you access to the complete manual.

NAME: Here you get a brief description of the command after its official name

SYNOPSIS: The usage of the command, with optional segments listed in brackets. When [OPTION] is specified, it means that the command can have the options listed under the next section added to it.

DESCRIPTION: Detailed information about the command, including options that can be added to it. Unless specified either here or in the synopsis, you can add as many of these options as you want.

SEE ALSO: This is an important section of the man page that is often overlooked. If the information you are looking for isn't available in this page, it may be available in one of the pages listed here. Also listed here is information referencing the info command, if that information exists. A description of the info command is in the next section.

Using man works similarly to using less, once you're reading the page. For more information, try reading the man page for man itself!

3.3. xman

xman is a graphical version of the program man described above. If you find man pages tedious, or just really like your mouse, try typing this at the command line: 

bash$ xman &

Alternatively, you could start xman from your menu system, which should look something like Figure 1:

Figure 1. Starting xman from your GUI menu

Whatever method you choose to start xman you should get a nice little window like that found in Figure 2:

Figure 2. The xman program

Just click on the "Help" button to get more information or click directly on the "Manual Page" button to look up man pages.

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