Oddball said the following on 11/23/2012 09:50 AM:
Did not know where to start...
I keep telling you but you don't listen ... Use 'apropos' ... keep using apropos with the various keywords you can come up with ... tty ... terminal ... (apropos also supports regular expressions; q.v.) If you read the manual page on manual pages $ man man (did you real the man page on map pages? Of course you didn't, its clear from what you say about them!) it will tell you the types of manual pages <quote> 1 Executable programs or shell commands 2 System calls (functions provided by the kernel) 3 Library calls (functions within program libraries) 4 Special files (usually found in /dev) 5 File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd 6 Games 7 Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions), e.g. man(7), groff(7) 8 System administration commands (usually only for root) 9 Kernel routines [Non standard] </quote> so you want to filter (you do know how to use grep, don't you?) for "1" "4" "5" and perhaps "7" and "8" depending on context. You're not programming in C so forget "3", and you're not hacking the kernel so forget "9" And one thing leads to another. Most manual page have a "See also" section. You should follow those to other man pages. And don't forget that the man command supports searching with regular expressions. You do now how to use regular expressions? Yes there's a man page on it (as well as a book from O'Reilly). Try using 'apropos' to find it. As we've said, man pages are 'specifications'. Real life will involve more than one command, so don't stop reading. And, as Brian White so eloquently said: <quote> A how-to says "run this command" and gives some string of stuff for you to copy like a monkey. But that is wrong because that example is not "how you do it", it is just one of infinite ways to do it, and it is the wrong way if taken outside of the context that was either set up, or worse just assumed, by the how-to itself. </quote> A 'how-to' may not match your context, but man pages are *never* out of context by definition. :-) -- If God does not write LisP, God writes some code so similar to LisP as to make no difference. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org