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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 donā€™t need internet to access it) for various installed things. While ā€œthingsā€ is generally going to be programs for most people, the ā€œman page databaseā€ can actually have entries for things that arenā€™t programs like various Linux internals! Here are a couple of other example man pages:

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 ā€œbuilt inā€ because its a part of the specific shell youā€™re 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, itā€™ll 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 doesnā€™t 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 the which 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, so ls is often by default an alias of ls --color=auto to give you a few splashes of colors in the output of the command without actually having to type out ls --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 the cd built-in!

Thatā€™s probably a bit more information than you originally intended, but I like to be thorough on these sorts of things as Iā€™m passionate about Linux! Note that at the start, man pages can often seem really daunting, but after spending some time looking at them youā€™ll 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 youā€™d usually write them!

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You explained a lot, thank you. This is my first experience with Linux and its community. Itā€™s very nice how willing everyone is to help explain

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