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Lesson 6 Essential man options
Objective Match man Options to their Correct Descriptions.

Match man Options to their Correct Descriptions

The man command is unique. For example, although many man page entries may exist for a specific command, the it will return the first document that it finds if you use it without any arguments. This feature can be misleading. You can, however, use many arguments to gain information that is more specific from the man pages. As a systems administrator, you should be especially familiar with the following options:
  1. man -a retrieves all manual pages for a specific command.
  2. man -k conducts keyword searches for all manual pages.
  3. man -S provides a comma-separated list of sections containing a specific command.
  4. man -C specifies a customized man.conf file. For example, you could type the command man -C policy, which would then return a man page you have created about your company's security policy to security_policy which would use the private_man.config file and return a man page you created on your company's security policy.
  5. man -M specifies the directories to search.

By typing unix manual pages , you can learn more about the details of the man command.

Navigating a specific man page


For some reason, Linux does not follow this convention, and instead stores the preformatted pages in subdirectories of /var/catman.

Unix man options

Click the link below to observe essential man options and their correct descriptions.
Unix man options

[1] cat: The cat command displays one or more files on the standard output. For example, the command cat file1 would display the contents of file1 on the output screen.

Unix System Administration