Terminal Help Pages 5

Terminal

Terminal Help Pages

Hey

After you get to use Terminal more and more you will come across commands that you don’t know what they do. Instead of searching the internet you can find help pages right in Terminal. It works with every command that you can use within Terminal.

If you open a Terminal window and type the following you can access the online help pages.

man [command]

This will then load from the internet the web page and display it in the Terminal window.


You can then use the up and down arrows to cycle through the document. Space bar to move a whole page up. Finally q to quit the page and return to the main Terminal window.

Admittedly these are not help pages for finding out how to implement a command or how to use it specifically, but it does help to find how the syntax of a command works, the order, and what is needed. It also offers some handy hints to enable you to remove or add more information when the command is finished. Try it on a command you use a lot and see if you find anything new. I know use it a lot and it really helps in a new Terminal window.

P.S. Sorry for the lack of posts yesterday, you have time off and you get random things pilled on, so you end up with less time than you did originally.


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5 Responses to “Terminal Help Pages”

  1. 1

    [...] files and web pages in Terminal but it can do a whole lot more. For some reason the link to the man page does not seem to work. So you can visit this URL [...]

    Comment By Installing wget On Your Mac For Terminal | Mac Tricks And Tips on July 15th, at 11:58 am

  2. 2

    “… This will then load from the internet the web page and display it in the Terminal window.”

    Ahm, man isn’t downloading anything. Instead it reads the man pages from a local directory and renders them in a format suitable for the terminal. Maybe you should do a man man when you’re next time in the Terminal. ;-)

    Cheers,
    Markus

    Comment By brimbrom on July 30th, at 8:03 pm

  3. 3

    [...] man [command] You can find more about this command here. [...]

    Comment By Five Quick Terminal Tips | Mac Tricks And Tips on August 21st, at 9:53 pm

  4. 4

    [...] while ago I mentioned about finding help pages in Terminal. Where by using the “man” command plus the name of the Terminal program you want to [...]

    Comment By View Terminal Help Pages Online | Mac Tricks And Tips on February 12th, at 6:11 pm

  5. 5

    Hello, I clicked on the Terminal picture on your web page, and I notice the up left buttons on the Terminal are different color then mine. (Red, Yellow, Green) How did you change the color?

    Comment By Rogelio on September 24th, at 1:44 am

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