MacTricksAndTips.com

Hey

A 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 find out about you can view its information. What actually happens is Terminal goes onto the Internet and finds the help page online. Since it is going online why don’t you surf the site directly? To be correct the man command doesn’t actually connect to the web, this information is stored on your computer, the reference page is actually a copy of these man pages, so you can access them online without the need to use Terminal.

You can, by heading over the the Reference Manual on Apples website you can view pretty much anything relating to Mac OS commands. The list includes:

• Terminal Documentation – Section 1
• UNIX System Calls – Section 2
• C Library Routines – Section 3
• File Formats – Section 4
• Games (only contains one link) – Section 6
• Miscellaneous – Section 7
• System Admin – Section 8
• Kernel And Programming – Section 9
• Tcl/Tk (which I have never heard of) – Section n (so cool it doesn’t have a number)

There are a couple of other sections mixed in between the other sections. But these are either really short or follow on. Many of the links, there is about 10,000, you will probably never have to read. But section one is very useful if you want to really extend your Terminal knowledge. Section 7 and 8 are also worth a read if you have some spare time.