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Help in Linux

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

face="Arial">The amount of documentation that Linux comes with is just tremendous. Let us

take a brief overview of what is available.

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Man Pages:
size="2">If you are looking for a command reference guide, then there

is nothing better than the man pages. These are the manual pages for all the

commands that are available on the system. Apart from commands several other topics like

system calls, library calls, file formats etc. are also covered by the man pages. To get

the manual page for a particular command (e.g. "find"), simply run the command

"man find".

If you are using the X-Window system, then the interface is even

better. Just run the command "xman", click on "Manual Page", pull down

the "Options" menu and select "Search". Type in the command you want,

and voila!



Info Pages: size="2"> The info pages on Linux are hypertext documentation. The

popularity of this kind of documentation is dwindling and most of the newer documents are

in HTML format instead. Just run "info", optionally followed by the command you

are interested in, and then use your cursor keys to navigate (hitting "?" will

get you help). Any item starting with a "*" is a menu item that you can hit

Enter on, to get more information.

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Package Documentation size="2">: Several of the packages have their own documentation, README

files, samples etc. are all part of the source packages. In RedHat, these are always

installed in a common location, which is /usr/doc/packagename. So for example if you have

fetchmail installed and the version of fetchmail is 4.5.8, then the documentation can be

found at /usr/doc/fetchmail-4.5.8.



Linux Documentation Project:
size="2"> The Linux documentation project is a mammoth collaborative

effort to create high quality documentation. These documents are contributed from all over

the world and are really in-depth.



HOWTOs: face="Arial"> face="Arial"> These can be found at /usr/doc/HOWTO. The formats are several, including

html, postscript, dvi etc. In fact one thing I like doing with the html format is to make

it available at the Intranet server. Rather than disturbing the order of things what I

normally do is create a symbolic link. Eg. change to the /home/httpd/html directory and

then type in:

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ln -sf /usr/doc/HOWTO/other-formats/html HOWTO

Now point your web browser to http:///HOWTO.

Check out the Consultants HOWTO at

http:///HOWTO/Consultants-HOWTO-37.html, which lists some Linux-related

resource companies in India.



FAQ:

face="Arial">The directory /usr/doc/FAQ contains a few FAQs. There are not too may of

these documents.



Guides: face="Arial">The best of the LDP documentation is available in the form of the guides.

There are four guides that have become really popular, The install-guide, the system

administrators guide, the network administrators guide and the Linux programmers guide.

The guides are in the directory /usr/doc/LDP.

Finally, the Internet. For users in India, an invaluable support is

the mailing list linux-india. You can get more details about linux-india at href="http://www.linux-india.org">http://www.linux-india.org.

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