Down that hole
No worries! The man
command is short for manual - basically, you can think of it as a local wiki on your computer (local being that you donāt need internet to access it) for various installed things. While āthingsā is generally going to be programs for most people, the āman page databaseā can actually have entries for things that arenāt programs like various Linux internals! Here are a couple of other example man pages:
- man (Yep, thereās a man page for the
man
command!) - ping
- ls
- bash-builtins
That last one, bash-builtins
I linked to also demonstrate that there are man pages for more than just programs. cd
for example is a very commonly used command, but its not actually a program - it is what is known as a ābuilt inā because its a part of the specific shell youāre using (9 times out of 10 these days, that is going to be bash
unless you install a different one like zsh
). A ton of commands can often be found under /usr/bin
(or /usr/local/bin
) - if you enter which program_name
at your shell, itāll tell you where exactly that program lives at. Commands come in many flavors, they can be programs, they can be built-ins, they can be shell scripts (even if there is no file extension, Linux doesnāt actually care about the file extension - its purely there for us humans!), or they can be aliases.
A couple of fun facts on even that itself:
- You can run
which which
to see where thewhich
command itself lives - The
which
command will also tell you if there is an alias defined for the command, an alias is a custom defined command - but if you have a longer command that you commonly want to run you can redefine it as an alias, sols
is often by default an alias ofls --color=auto
to give you a few splashes of colors in the output of the command without actually having to type outls --color=auto
every time - Despite the fact that
cd
is a built-in, for what I believe is compatibility reasons, there is a file at/usr/bin/cd
on most Linux distributionsā¦ which itself is just a shell script that actually invokes thecd
built-in!
Thatās probably a bit more information than you originally intended, but I like to be thorough on these sorts of things as Iām passionate about Linux! Note that at the start, man pages can often seem really daunting, but after spending some time looking at them youāll get really good at quickly finding what you need. You can even write your own, and there is even a man page on the conventions and specifications on how youād usually write them!