Documentation and manual

Software under Linux rarely comes with printed documentation. Some do, like the GIMP and Blender, but most only come with online documentation. This way, you can get the documentation at the same time that you download the program.

There are 2 traditional ways to provide documentation under Unix and Linux:

The first is man pages. These are small files containing information about every command you have on your system. For example, if you want to know what the command df does, simply type:

man df

The man system works with level of commands, from 1 to 8, plus other extensions. For full details about the man program, simply see its manual page:

man man

The second way to provide help is with the info system. These are usually much bigger files (the libc info files have more than 10,000 lines of text).

To access info files, simply type the info command. It is a bit harder to use, but you can get help by typing h.