Getting Help (You'll Never Memorize It All)

Getting Help

Scenario: It's your first week. Your senior hands you a command you've never seen and walks off. You don't panic - because a pro's real skill isn't memorizing 5,000 commands, it's knowing how to look things up fast.

Command	What it gives you
`man ls`	The manual - full reference for a command
`ls --help`	Quick option summary (faster than man)
`apropos copy`	Search man pages by keyword
`type cd`	Is it a program, alias, or shell builtin?
`which ls`	Where does this command live on disk?

Inside a man page: arrow keys scroll, /word searches, n jumps to the next match, and q quits.

$ man wc        # opens the manual (press q to quit)
$ wc --help | head -4
Usage: wc [OPTION]... [FILE]...
Print newline, word, and byte counts for each FILE

Tip: Stuck inside man and can't get out? Press q. (This is the second most-Googled Linux question - the first is coming up in the vim module.)

Reading a synopsis: [OPTION]... means options are optional and repeatable; FILE... means one or more files.