There are thousands of Linux commands with many options and it is impossible to remember all of them. The man (short for manual page) utility uses the less program to display information about a particular command. The usage is very simple; you just type man followed by the command you want to find more about. For example, to get more information about the ls command, you would type man ls. This opens up the less program with useful information about the ls command: what it does, how it is invoked, options, copyright information, etc.
Using the man command is the most common way of getting information about commands and you should be familiar with this program.
Here is another useful feature of the man command. You can search the name and summary sections of all man pages. This comes in handy when you don’t know the exact command for something you would like to do. For example, if you want to delete a directory but don’t know the exact command, you could type man -k delete. This will display all command names and descriptions that include the word “delete“. Here is the output:
To find out more about the man command, simply type man man.
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