Asklemmy

43891 readers

768 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

218

What's a handy terminal command you use often? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

276 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

thanks for the advice. I knew about the search feature, but sometimes the stuff you need isn't even on the page. I have no idea how to find what I need when it's not in "man cmdname" how am I supposed to know that the feature i want has a dedicated page?

how could I find certain commands if i didn't already know it was a shell builtin and not a command? It's not like you get a manpage saying "this is not a command". And even if i did have the idea to open the bash page, it's still useless, because builtins are their own dedicated page. That sort of stuff. It rarely ever makes things easier for me.

edit, it is occasionally useful phen I have already found what I want on google and just want some more in depth details.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If something is a bash built-in run help blah for it's "man page"

But yeah, man pages tick me off. Wait until you learn that there are sometimes more than one per command. I have to Google which page is which because they're all for specific things. man foo is the equivalent of man 1 foo. What's annoying is that the few times I've seen something referenced on another page the entry usually just says something like it's on "the relevant man page" rather than just telling you exactly which.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

ok but that still entails trying random things until i find it. If I didn't already know it was a builtin i wouldn't know to search there. The bash thing was just an example. I have learned this stuff since i encountered the problem. This is just me recollecting my experience of trying to use man

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Unfortunately, sometimes (often) there is no man page for what you are looking for. So if you get a page not found, that's usually the case. You can usually find associated pages all the way at the bottom. That helps when what you are looking for isn't a command, but a reference. I don't remember exactly where it is, but man pages are stored in a directory. Probably /etc or /usr. You can always dump that list into fzf or use grep to search to see if there is a page for what you are looking for. It's not a perfect system by any means, but it's a good one to have in your toolbelt.