Getting Help at the Command Line

Get help for a command

ls --help

Output the help to a file so it can be searched

ls --help > lshelp.txt

Scroll through the file:

less lshelp.txt

Quit out of it by hitting q.

Find out what will run with ls:

which ls

See if there are more on the system:

which -a ls

Find out more information about a command:

whereis ls

Find out what a command is:

whatis crontab

man -f crontab

This will show us the sections.

man man

There will be a table that shows us the section numbers. Quit out of it by hitting q.

man -f crontab

man 5 crontab

This takes us to the configuration file format of crontab. Quit out of it by hitting q.

If we don't know which one we want, enter:

man -a crontab

It will show us the first one. Quit by hitting q. if we want the next one. Hit Enter.

cd /usr/share/doc/packages

Run the following:

tree -H '/usr/share/doc/packages' -L 1 --noreport --charset utf-8 > ~/packages_index.html

Note: If tree is not installed, you can install it by running sudo -i zypper in tree.