Navigating info Pages

While viewing a man page. Navigate with arrows, pgUp, PgDn . moves to next link press Tab .  Enter follows the selected link. n / p / u goes to the next / previous / up-one node . s text searches for text (default: last search) . q quits info.

* This Tutorial for Red Hat Linux Enterprise System *

The info command

Similar to man, but often more in depth. Run info without args to list all page. Info pages are structured like a website. Each page is divided into “nodes”. Links to nodes are preceded by * .

info command

* This Tutorial  for Red Hat Enterprise Linux System*

Navigation main page

Knowing how to efficiently navigate and search a man page will save you enormous amounts of frustration nad make you a much more effective Linux user.

• To search for text in a main page, simply type a forward slash  ( / )
• Navigate with arrows, PgUp, PgDn
• n/N goes to next/previous match
• q    quits.

* This Tutorial  for Red Hat Enterprise Linux System*

The help option

–help

Displays usage summary and argument list. Used  by most, but not all, commands. Most commands have a  –help  option. This casues the command to print a description of what is does, a “usage statement” that describes the command’s syntax and a list of the options it accepts and what they do.

[root@localhost  ~]# date  –help
Usage: date  [OPTION]  . . .  [+FORMAT]  or:
date  [-u ! – – utc ! – – universal ]  [MMDDHHmm [ [CC] YY ]  [ . ss ] ]
Display the current time in the given FORMAT,
or set the system date.
. . . argument list omitted . . .

help option

* This tips for Red Hat Enterprise Linux System*

The whatis command

# whatis

Whatis accepts the name of another command as its only argument. It then searches for the given command name in a database of short descriptions. If it finds a match, the description is printed to your screen. Along with the description ,  whatis  prints the command’s name and a number in parenthesis. The database that whatis uses re-generated automatically every night. This means that newly-installed systems whatis will not work at first because the database does not yet exist; the impatient can generate a database without waiting for the automatic update by asking an administrator to log in and run

# makewhatis.

whatis command updating

Example:

[root@localhost  ~]# whatis  cal 

Cal                                          (1)      – displays a calendar
cal                                           (1p)    – print a calendar

whatis command