How to find out more about a command?

There is a command called man that will let you view the man (online manual) page for a command. Just type man and you will see a screen that shows info about the command you listed.

Here are some examples:

> man ls (show info about the ls command)

> man man (show info about the man command)

I should mention that man has different sections. When we use it like this we are looking at section 1 which is for general commands. There are other sections for system calls and c library functions that I wont get into in this post. Here's one example of how to look at the different sections:

> man 3 fscanf (section 3 is for c library functions)

Commands used in this post: man