Getting help
When using Linux there will be times that you have to get documentation from somewhere. Whether it be a basic command or an obscure program you have no knowledge about there might be situations that documentation is necessary for you. Fortunately, when using Linux doing that is easy. You can get help even without connecting to the Internet. In this section ways to get help for Linux related issues will be discussed.
The apropos command
When using Linux, the names of commands might confuse even the experienced users. Their alias might change distribution to distribution or the task that a program does might be done by another program that carries a different name. apropos is a command that searches through manual pages and shows the related commands. A typical usage of the apropos command is like this:
yourname@computer:~$ apropos 7z 7zz (1) - 7-Zip file archiver with a high compression ratio
In this scenario, the keyword 7z was searched and the related command 7zz was found.
The man command
Although the apropos command and the help option of programs provides sufficient information for basic use, there might be cases that you need more information. In (GNU/)Linux, programs usually come with their manual pages. Using the man command, you can easily access the manual pages and gather the needed knowledge for your usage. With that, manual pages are divided to sections. Many of them are for more technical details, but they might have use for some cases.
| Section number | Content |
|---|---|
| 1 | Executables or shell commands |
| 2 | System calls |
| 3 | Library functions |
| 4 | Special files |
| 5 | File types |
| 6 | Games |
| 7 | Miscallenous |
| 8 | System management commands |
| 9 | Non-standard kernel functions |
You can access the specific information about a command in a section with putting a dot and the section number after the name you want to search.
Getting help from other sources
Although manual pages are a great source of information and answers questions frequently they are simply a source of documentation. When using Linux you might encounter problems that you don't understand or you can't solve. Online sources are the best solution for problems. When there is an error, it's good to search it up on the Internet. Many people probably had the same problem and there are solutions everywhere. Although a few people uses them, books are a good source of information too. Books usually conduct the experience of the author with pure information, so you might learn more about GNU/Linux by reading.