How to Search in Man Pages in Ubuntu / Linux

Post author:Amarpreet Kaur
Post published:January 19, 2022
Post category:Uncategorized
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1. How to search in 'man' pages in Ubuntu / Linux ?

You can learn how to access the manual pages for those commands. And you’re also going to learn how to read them so that you can go out there and independently learn how to use new stuff.So by the end of this article, you’ll have the independence to search for new commands and learn about how they work.

And this is going to put you in the driver’s seat because it makes it possible for you to gain more control of your Linux system because you can start learning independently about how everything works rather than waiting for random changes that you randomly bump into learning new commands.

Well, let’s say that you wanted to look up information about the which command first to search the manual, you would have to use the man command.

Now, the man command is short for the word manual, and it’s the command that deals with everything to do with the manual, basically and this is why they’re actually called man pages, because it’s the man command that looks throughthe manual. Then -k is the option to search command. Now look at the below gif for how the search works.

$ man -k which

OK, so let’s let’s have a look at what this is on the screen here. You’re going to get the names of certain manual pages. I say every single one of these is a manual page that is appropriate to this search term on left side.

and on the right, you get a bit of a synopsis about the actual page. So you can pick which one might be most appropriate. OK, and the other thing is in the parentheses here, you get the section number of the manual that page is in. for example , the last one which (1), which is a command and 1 is a section

$ man 1 which

Alternatively, when we are looking manual page of any command of section 1, we need not to write section number while writing the command, we can directly write as :

$ man which

This open the manual page of which command with section 1 and if you want to close the window of manual page, Press q

Similarly if you want to open manual page of sol (6), just write the following command in terminal

$ man 6 sol

This is how the manual page of particular command with the section can be accessed directly.

Now we can see that this manual page is actually broken up into the following sections of the top. We’ve got a name, then we’ve got synopsis, then we’ve got a description, then we’ve got options, then we’ve got exit status. OK, now other sections that are man page may include are examples, a C also section, an environment section, things about bugs, things about authors, things about reporting bugs, history of the command copywrite things, stuff like that.

OK, but this is what we get in this specific manual page.

2. How to find a particular command for specific task ?

It’s going to take your Linux abilities to a whole new level. Now you are going to learn how to find a particular command for specific task, for an example we can say we want to find a command that is used to “list the directory content” and what we’re going to do is we’re going to look at a command that will allow us to list out what is in a folder also known as a directory.

$ man - k "list directory content"

Ok, Sometimes you might not get the search terms available right away.You might have to try different words and different keywords.

Now they all seem to pretty much do what we want, right.They all seem to say list directory contents.But the one that I’m specifically looking for, I’ve heard about it online is the ls. command. Now just type :-

$ man ls