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man
Man is short for "online manual." It's where you can find out
information about Unix commands, Emacs, C++ and C libraries, and even
man! The first useful thing to know about man is some of the command
line arguments it takes:
- -k - find me all things with this word or phrase in them.
e.g. man -k c++ will give you all entries containing the
word "c++".
- -s - search only in this section (for instance, section 3C
is the one where you can expect to find stuff about C and C++
libraries).
Try doing some searches. See if you can find:
- The man page for the math library
- The man page for g++
- The man page for rcs
Sometimes, man pages give you pointers to other man pages with more
information. The man page for rcs is an excellent example, since it
points you to the man pages for co, ci and rlog, which are really more
helpful.
If you don't know what command you are looking for, think of a word
which is likely to be in the man file for that command (for instance,
if you want a command to remove files) and do man -k that
word. Sometimes you get a ton of answers; you can skip most of them.
It helps if you can narrow the search down to a specific section.
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