Before I started using Linux I heard about all of the help you couldn’t get on-line, the rumor was that many times when you asked for help, you got the standard response; RTFM (an acronym for read the fine manual – family friendly blog folks). For the record, I have never once received that response, I have many times been given assistance and then a follow-up suggestion to check the man page for further info. Maybe it’s just the distros I’m using, but I’ve had great experiences with forums and IRC. Anyway, that isn’t really the topic here, before you can RTFM, you need to know how.
Reading man pages is easy but it requires a bit of command line interaction. Open up your terminal program (most likely konsole or gnome-terminal) and enter the command:
man shutdown
What this will show you is the man page for the shutdown command. The man page will give you the name, synopsis, description and options for shutdown.
You can scroll through the man pages using page up/page down as well as the up and down arrow keys. When your finished press q to dismiss the page and return to the prompt.
Within the shutdown man page (and many others) you will find a See Also section, this will refer you to other man pages related to the command:
SEE ALSO
fsck(8), init(8), halt(8), poweroff(8), reboot(8)
You can return to the prompt and enter man reboot for more information on that command. Don’t enter the (8) following the command (but if you want to, you would enter it as man 8 reboot). The numbers in parenthesis following the commands indicate the category the command is assigned to (8 is the system administration category). For more information on manual pages visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page or enter man man at your prompt.
October 8th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
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