Find help with man pages

Contributed by qmchenry September 28, 2003  
Tagged: UNIX

The UNIX command line interface is wonderfully, wickedly powerful. With that power comes complexity if only in the sheer number of commands. Even seasoned UNIX gurus need help remembering the syntax of less frequently used commands. Fortunately, UNIX has a great built-in manual called man.

To get information for a command such as grep, use:

man grep

If you are not sure what the name of a command is, try using a keyword search. The keywords are matched against the Name line in each known man page which contains the name of the command and a brief description of its function. To search for man pages relating to SQL databases, commands, or functions, use:

man -k sql