In my last post I covered reading man pages via the console. Depending on your distro, you may find that man pages are available via your desktop’s GUI help center.
Ubuntu does this very well, while Fedora had some wonkiness.
Ubuntu/Gnome users can select System > Help > System Documentation. The Help Topics page contains a few categories dedicated to Ubuntu specific documentation, scrolling down will show Other Document Categories. Here you will want to click the Command Line Help link. You will be shown two more categories; GNU Info Pages and Manual Pages. Info pages tend to be more in depth where man pages give you the basics and then leave you to experiment. Once you select one of these categories, you’ll find yet another collection of categories, you can select one of them or simply enter the command you’re interested in learning about into the search field. Entering shutdown will give you the man page for the shutdown command.
Note: When I first entered the help center and attempted to search for some common commands, the results didn’t include any man pages. Once I browsed through some of the available man pages, the search results began including manuals. YMMV.
Fedora works much the same way, within Gnome you select System > Help. You’ll have fewer categories, but the command line help is there. I’ve found that browsing the command line help works perfectly, however I usually prefer to just search for what I want. Here is where Fedora has some issues. Entering shutdown into the search field results in the help center displaying a link to the man page, clicking on that link gives nothing more than an error about an invalid uniform resource identifier. My Google-fu might be lacking today, I just can’t locate any fixes for it.
If you’d rather not read your man pages via the terminal, this is the graphical way to get it done.
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