UNIX has manual pages stored on-line for most commands. The command man followed by the command name displays these reference manual pages.

To read the manual pages on the command man, type the following:

hostname{~}% man man

Since the command man uses more to display the text, you use more’s commands to get around, i.e., the space bar for the next page, b to go back a page, and q to quit. The manual pages are not written for the beginning user. Therefore, the beginner needs to learn how to extract useful information by selectively skipping over sections and ignoring large portions. Try reading some other man pages, say for ls and cd.

If you don't know the command you want but want to find an appropriate one, you can try a keyword search of man. Using the -k option and the keyword does this. Say you want to copy a file but can't remember the command. Trying ‘man copy’ gives the message “No manual entry for copy” that means there is no command spelled “copy”. We could try the following keyword search:

hostname{~}% man -k copy

And find lots of commands that do copying including cp that is what we wanted.