How to Use the Man Command

The man command is used to display the manual pages for various commands and topics in Unix-like operating systems. Here’s how you can use it:

To view the manual page for a specific command, use the following syntax:

man {{command}}

For example, to view the manual page for the ls command, you would run:

man ls

To navigate through the manual page, you can use the following keys:

• Spacebar: Scroll down one page
• Enter: Scroll down one line
• B: Scroll up one page
• Q: Quit the manual page viewer

You can also search for specific keywords within the manual page by pressing / followed by the keyword and then pressing Enter. To find the next occurrence of the keyword, press N.

Additionally, you can specify the section number of the manual page if there are multiple sections with the same command name. For example, to view the manual page for the printf function in the C library, you would run:

man 3 printf

Keep in mind that not all commands or topics have manual pages available.