How do I access that basic command line tutorial man document?

Question

I need to find that documentation that acts like a simple description and tutorial of how the command line works. It's "man something" I knw that much, so it's a man page, but not an actual command. It mentions the "find" command having a baroque syntax, I remember that. How do I find this page?

You could have tried asking to the man himself: man man. Scroll slightly and man -a intro is one of the examples with a description of what it does. — Bakuriu, Jul 13 '18 at 21:13
You may be interested in Introduction to Linux by Machtelt Garrels, available on the Linux Documentation Project website. — AlexP, Jul 13 '18 at 21:44

score 33 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 13 '18 at 06:42

33

You are looking for the man intro. Just type

man intro

This will open the first man intro section, the one that you are (I will stab a guess) most likely interested in. To view all man intro sections type

man -a intro

and you will be prompted to view them all, unless you decide to quit.

answered Jul 13 '18 at 06:42

Prashant Morgenstern

373

2

@Graham OP can't upvote the answer, not enough reputation, but he can mark the answer as ACCEPTED, notably for people which will find this topic on Google for example – damadam Jul 13 '18 at 06:57

Digital Trauma · Answer 2 · 2018-07-13T22:35:18.040

5

man intro is the right answer here. But to be a bit more general, if you want to search all manpages for particular keywords, you can use man -wK.

In particular, you knew that the page you were looking for contained the word "baroque", which is a nice specific search term:

$ man -wK baroque
/usr/share/man/man1/intro.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/zshmodules.1.gz
$

If you want to jump directly to the manpages in the results, in turn, simply use man -K instead.

Note that the -K option is a brute-force search through all manpages, so can take some time. In my case it takes 20-25 seconds on my Ubuntu VM.

edited Jul 13 '18 at 22:35

answered Jul 13 '18 at 21:39

Digital Trauma

2,445
15
24

3

Note that man -K "is a brute-force search, and is likely to take some time; if you can, you should specify a section to reduce the number of pages that need to be searched." For example: man -S 1 -K baroque (section 1 - user commands) takes less than a third of the time than without specifying the section. If you know a keyword in the description of a page you can use man -k KEYWORD (lower case "k") which can also be run as apropos KEYWORD (e.g. apropos introduction) which will be faster still. – Dennis Williamson Jul 13 '18 at 22:25

How do I access that basic command line tutorial man document?

2 Answers2