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<!--
The FreeBSD Documentation Project
$FreeBSD$
-->
<chapter id="basics">
<title>Unix Basics</title>
<sect1 id="basics-man">
<title>The Online Manual</title>
<para>The most comprehensive documentation on FreeBSD is in the form of
<emphasis>man pages</emphasis>. Nearly every program on the system
comes with a short reference manual explaining the basic operation and
various arguments. These manuals can be view with the
<command>man</command> command. Use of the <command>man</command>
command is simple:</para>
<screen>&prompt.user; <userinput>man <replaceable>command</replaceable></userinput></screen>
<para><replaceable>command</replaceable> is the name of the command you
wish to learn about. For example, to learn more about
<command>ls</command> command type:</para>
<screen>&prompt.user; <userinput>man ls</userinput></screen>
<para>The online manual is divided up into numbered sections:</para>
<orderedlist>
<listitem>
<para>User commands</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>System calls and error numbers</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Functions in the C libraries</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Device drivers</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>File formats</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Games and other diversions</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Miscellaneous information</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>System maintenance and operation commands</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Kernel developers</para>
</listitem>
</orderedlist>
<para>In some cases, the same topic may appear in more than one section of
the on-line manual. For example, there is a <command>chmod</command>
user command and a <function>chmod()</function> system call. In this
case, you can tell the <command>man</command> command which one you want
by specifying the section:</para>
<screen>&prompt.user; <userinput>man 1 chmod</userinput></screen>
<para>This will display the manual page for the user command
<command>chmod</command>. References to a particular section of the
on-line manual are traditionally placed in parenthesis in written
documentation, so &man.chmod.1; refers to the
<command>chmod</command> user command and &man.chmod.2; refers to the
system call.</para>
<para>This is fine if you know the name of the command and simply wish to
know how to use it, but what if you cannot recall the command name? You
can use <command>man</command> to search for keywords in the command
<emphasis>descriptions</emphasis> by using the <option>-k</option>
switch:</para>
<screen>&prompt.user; <userinput>man -k mail</userinput></screen>
<para>With this command you will be presented with a list of commands that
have the keyword “mail” in their descriptions. This is
actually functionally equivalent to using the <command>apropos</command>
command.</para>
<para>So, you are looking at all those fancy commands in
<filename>/usr/bin</filename> but do not even have the faintest idea
what most of them actually do? Simply do a
<screen>&prompt.user; <userinput>cd /usr/bin; man -f *</userinput></screen>
or
<screen>&prompt.user; <userinput>cd /usr/bin; whatis *</userinput></screen>
which does the same thing.</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="basics-info">
<title>GNU Info Files</title>
<para>FreeBSD includes many applications and utilities produced by the
Free Software Foundation (FSF). In addition to man pages, these
programs come with more extensive hypertext documents called
“info” files which can be viewed with the
<command>info</command> command or, if you installed
<command>emacs</command>, the info mode of
<command>emacs</command>.</para>
<para>To use the &man.info.1; command, simply type:</para>
<screen>&prompt.user; <userinput>info</userinput></screen>
<para>For a brief introduction, type <userinput>h</userinput>. For a
quick command reference, type <userinput>?</userinput>.</para>
</sect1>
</chapter>
<!--
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-->
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