Day 1 - Getting help

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The help system is not always that straightforward, though. There are commands to learn there as

well. So, how do we get help… on the help? Well, as you can see from the bottom line while q stands

for quit, h stands for help. So far so good, sooner or later there will be an a that stands for zoo, but

the basic commands are apparently in good terms with the alphabet.

If you press h, then, the screen changes and shows the meta-help, which is the help on the help. I’m

not going through it, you can read it later. For the time being, be aware that if you don’t remember

a command or a shortcut, you can ask the system itself before reading the whole Stack Overflow

knowledge base looking for the answer.

There is one important action that is worth learning now, namely searching for strings. Manual

pages can be very long, and sometimes very boring, endlessly discussing details that are apparently

irrelevant, while you absolutely need that switch now (most often because your system is crumbling

to pieces, users are calling infuriated, but you still want to have the list of running processes ordered

by CPU usage, because it’s neat).

So, to seach for a string in a manual page you tap / (note the bottom line waiting for your input)

and type the string that you are looking for. Try escape, remember to hit ENTER after you typed the

word. Well, you should have been gratified by the highlighting of the searched words, which is a

great visual help. You can now move forward through the results hitting n (next), and backwards

hitting N (Not the next one, the previous one).

Exercises

Oh yeah, there are exercises for you! My experience as a learner is that many times I read or listen

to something, and I cosider it learned, only to discover that when I’m alone after a while I don’t

remember it very well, or that some parts of what was discussed are still unclear. So, my advice for

you is: go through the exercises, even though they might seem trivial to you. Practising is always

good, even when you are a master coder. I’m not, and if you are reading this book, probably you

aren’t either. Which leads to… exercises!

Exercise 1.01

Enter the man page for the echo command and locate the AUTHOR (actually the authors).

Go to solution

Exercise 1.02

Enter the man page for the sort command (we haven’t used it yet, but the man page is there).

Enter the online help and locate how to Undo (toggle) search highlighting with the search