Hardcopy and Unix Online Manuals |
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Hardcopy Manuals |
A number of manuals are availble to users in each of the Engineering Workstation Labs. You may check out a manual by
giving your ID to the consultant. The monitor will keep your ID with an index card listing the title of the manual checked out. Try not
to check out all of the manuals on a given subject at once, other users may need them as well. Manuals CANNOT leave the lab,
they must be used in the workstation labs. |
| Online Manuals |
Online manuals are a great source of information because they are always available to you and can be accessed from anywhere. It may take a little time to understand the way in which man pages are formatted and how to use the commands that they describe,
but there are some basic ideas that you can keep in mind which will help you to effectively use the online manual pages. |
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man command |
The command to use is:
man *.* where *.* is whatever command you are interested in looking up. For example, if you wanted to learn more about ls, the command that allows you to see
what's in your directory, you would type:
man ls
Looking at a man page for the first time can be confusing. There are two main parts to look at when you are reading the man page. If you are an experienced user, just a peek at the first part of the manual entry that contains the flags will be sufficien
t for you, but if you are an inexperienced user, you will want to read the descriptions of the flags which are contained at the middle of the man page. |
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Using flags |
When you use flags, you get more out of the commands that you use. A flag is the part of the command that comes after a dash. A couple of examples include:
ls -al
The "-al" part is called the flag. It allows the user not only to see what is in their directory, but also what dot files are in their directory, how big the files are, and other information. Another example is:
mpage -4 -Pgllas1 filename There are two flags in this command. They are "-4" and "-P". The "-4" tells the printer to print 4 pages per printed page and the "-P" tells the computer which printer to print to. |
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