Linux commands

[Duane Attaway]

On Tue, 24 Dec 2002 rsobba at kcnet.com wrote:

> With Windows XP I am able to type help at a command prompt and get a
> listing of commands with a brief description. I am familiar with man
> pages and info but is there a similar command in Linux as help in XP?

You have a few options in linux.  If you are in the BASH shell, you may 
have command line completion.  Hitting the TAB key twice will yield you 
all executable files in your PATH environment variable.  This will give 
you several thousand commands (or more...)

The great "apropos" search:

apropos <something>

To be a bit more selective, you can use this "apropos" command.  Its like
a google search of the term you are looking for and lists a summary.  The
"makewhatis" command creates this database by reading all man pages.  
Since this database is compiled from man pages, use the man command to
find out more from the brief description of the found commands that look
interesting.  

How much information does apropos return?  Everything including every C
function and part of the kitchen sink.  Try to apropos the word "time"...  
If there's a man page for it, its in there.  I'd guess the makewhatis
command is in most distribution's crontab file for automatic updating.

As an example, pipe the output of apropos into grep to narrow down your
search:

apropos time | grep -i ascii  <--ascii conversion with time?

or

apropos time | grep -iv tcl   <--if I'm not interested in tcl commands

Also, most commands use the standard -h or --help command option if you
want to learn more about it.  Unfortunately, some don't and swing into
full operation before you know it.  Hopefully, such behavior will be
considered as a bug by enough people to get them tamed down to a command
line friendly status.

Does this help?

--
Why drive a car when you can ride a bike?
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