Abstract
In this section, we present resources useful for any GNU/Linux distribution. Most are not written specifically for Mandriva Linux, but may nevertheless prove useful.
Most packages
include their own documentation in one of the sub-directories of
/usr/share/doc, which will be named after the
specific package. Mandriva Linux's own documentation, when
installed, is available in the
/usr/share/doc/mandriva/ directory.
Abstract
The Manual Pages (also known as “man pages”) are a set of exhaustive documents, which help you acquire better knowledge of GNU/Linux commands. The latter are usually issued through the “command line” and allow great control over your system (see the Introduction to the Command Line chapter of the Reference Manual). Although these man pages might seem discouraging at first, they offer great detail and we encourage you to browse through them when a problem occurs.
This should be
your primary source of information for shell
commands. Almost all commands have a manual page. Other items,
such as certain configuration files, library functions for
programmers and others system aspects also have their own man
pages.
Man page contents are arranged in different sections. References to these are made in the following manner: for example, open(2), fstab(5) respectively refers to the open page in section 2 and the fstab page in section 5.
![[Tip]](images/tip.png)
To display a man page in a
terminal (or shell), type man. The syntax to obtain
a man page is:
man [options] [section] <manual page>
man also has documentation, which can be obtained by typing man man. Manual pages are formatted and then displayed using the less pager.
The names of the manual pages and their relevant sections appear at the top of each page. At the bottom of the page are references to other pages with related subjects (usually in the SEE ALSO section).
You can start by consulting the pages related to the different commands covered in the Reference Manual: ls(1), chmod(1), etc.
If you cannot find
the right manual page — for example, you want to use
the mknod function in one of your programs but
you end up on the mknod command page — make sure
you spell out the section explicitly. In our example: man
2 mknod. If you forget the exact section, man
-a mknod will read through all the sections looking for
pages named mknod.