## Know Your Shell Commands
## Daniel Jung <mimiandi@bh.mbn.or.jp>

Q: Why do I need to know shell commands?

A: Knowing necessary shell commands with right flag will save you lots
of time and will look like you know what you are doing.  Also, you
will never hear someone tell you to RTFM.

1. Man pages?

The man command is like help under windows.  It will provide you with
necessary (sometimes hard to understand) descriptions on topics 
relating to the Unix system.  For example, to view the man page for
cd, do the following:

	% man cd

Q: I can't remember the full command but remember it started with 
   "pro**".  Can I still find man page on this command?

A: Yes, try man -k pro or using apropos pro will do the same. 

Q: There are two or even three man pages on same command.  Why?

A: There are nine sections in man pages. Look at the following 
   description.    

	Section 1: User Commands
	Section 2: Operating system services *
	Section 3: Library functions *
	Section 4: Devices, networks and interfaces
	Section 5: System file formats
	Section 6: Games Demo programs
	Section 7: Misc
	Section 8: System maintenance commands +
	Section 9: Relating to Kernel +

	* These sections are usually related to C programs.
	+ These sections are not that important to you at this moment.

Q: How do I invoke these sections of man pages?

A: Simply type the section you want like so (intro is shell command):

	% man 1 intro
	% man 8 intro

Here is summary of command 'man' you should at least know. 

	1) man <topic>
	2) man [n] <topic>
	3) man -k keyword

- Daniel

$Id: newbie.txt,v 1.1 2000/02/16 08:07:51 jim Exp $