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The man command prints pages of the UNIX Programmers Manual on the screen. Each page, called "a man page," describes one command. To use the man command, type the following:
man command
The man command responds by printing on the screen the man page for the command you typed in place of command. For example, if you wished to learn more about the man command, you could try:
man man
Once you have a man page on your screen, you'll want to know the information listed below.
If you don't know the exact name of the UNIX command you're looking
for, you can use: man -k something
man -k
responds by printing on the screen
a list of all the commands it finds that are similar to
the word you typed in place of something or that contain that
word in the description of the command. You can
then use the man
command to get information about the command
you're interested in.
For example, here are the results of using man -k compiler to find compiler man pages.
cccp, cpp (1) - The GNU C-Compatible Compiler Preprocessor. g++ (1) - GNU project C++ Compiler (v2 preliminary) gcc, g++ (1) - GNU project C and C++ Compiler (v2 preliminary) cc (1v) - C compiler error (1) - categorize compiler error messages, insert at responsible source file lines rpcgen (1) - RPC protocol compiler tic (8v) - terminfo compiler yacc (1) - yet another compiler-compiler zic (8) - time zone compiler bdftosnf (1) - BDF to SNF font compiler for X11 cfc (8) - Sendmail cf file compiler ease (8) - precompiler for sendmail configuration files f77 (1) - Sun FORTRAN compiler f90 (1) - Fortran 90 compiler fp (1) - Functional Programming language compiler/interpreter fpc (1) - fp to C compiler orc (1) - The Oregon C++ compiler pc (1) - Pascal compiler sicstus2.1 (1) - SICS Prolog compiler/interpreter sml, smld, smlc (1) - Standard ML compiler
Then you can look at the man page for the C compiler, called cc
,
by typing: man cc
This command should come up with a page with the following sections:
There are other sections that are sometimes used: WARNINGS, BUGS, and others.
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