How to read Linux man pages?
If you want to read man pages, maybe the articles from The Linux Journal on Getting help on Linux — Part 1: man pages and Getting help on Linux — Part 2: info will help you.
Also we have info
pages in Linux and those are more detailed than man
pages...
You can read the output of the following commands:
info man
info info
man info
man man
The following links are good for you too: 1 2 3 4
Being productive in reading man pages
Apart from Laxmikant's answer, I would like to add something which will actually make you faster and more productive while reading man pages.
You can use various Vim-like keybindings to navigate faster.
A few quintessential examples:
Press
/
and then type some keyword you want to search for and then press enter. It will highlight the first result. Then, you can go to the next search result by pressingn
and back byShift+n
If you are reading a very long page, and you need to switch back and forth between a few sections, use marks. Let us say, I am at a certain position of the man page. To mark the position, I press
m
and followed by some key, say1
. Now, the position is saved at mark1
. If I scroll somewhere else and I need to revisit this position, I simple pressa
followed by1
.Use
d
andu
for scrolling half a page down/up.
And remember, to escape from any command/mode mentioned above, the key is esc
, of course.
UPDATE: Using Vim for reading man pages
To be even more productive, you could directly use Vim, like:
man ls | vi -
Or even better, define a function in your ~/.bashrc
file (in case you're using Bash):
vman() { vim <(man $1); }
Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/25057995/1359467
All man pages follow a common layout that is optimized for presentation on a simple ASCII text display, possibly without any form of highlighting or font control. Sections present may include:
NAME
The name of the command or function, followed by a one-line description of what it does.
SYNOPSIS
In the case of a command, a formal description of how to run it and what command line options it takes. For program functions, a list of the parameters the function takes and which header file contains its definition.
DESCRIPTION
A textual description of the functioning of the command or function.
EXAMPLES
Some examples of common usage.
SEE ALSO
A list of related commands or functions.
Other sections may be present, but these are not well standardized across man pages. Common examples include: OPTIONS
, EXIT STATUS
, ENVIRONMENT
, BUGS
, FILES
, AUTHOR
, REPORTING BUGS
, HISTORY
and COPYRIGHT
.
See also Wikipedia on Man page