The most comprehensive documentation on FreeBSD is in the
form of manual pages. Nearly every program on the system
comes with a short reference manual explaining the basic
operation and available arguments. These manuals can be
viewed using man
:
%
man command
where command
is the name of
the command to learn about. For example, to learn more about
ls(1), type:
%
man ls
The online manual is divided into numbered sections:
User commands.
System calls and error numbers.
Functions in the C libraries.
Device drivers.
File formats.
Games and other diversions.
Miscellaneous information.
System maintenance and operation commands.
Kernel developers.
In some cases, the same topic may appear in more than one
section of the online manual. For example, there is a
chmod(1) user command and a
chmod()
system call. To tell man(1)
which section to display, specify the section number:
%
man 1 chmod
This will display the manual page for the user command chmod(1). References to a particular section of the online manual are traditionally placed in parenthesis in written documentation, so chmod(1) refers to the user command and chmod(2) refers to the system call.
If the command name is unknown, use man
-k
to search for keywords in the command
descriptions:
%
man -k mail
This command displays a list of commands that have the keyword “mail” in their descriptions. This is equivalent to using apropos(1).
To determine what the commands in
/usr/bin
do,
type:
%
cd /usr/bin
%
man -f *
or
%
cd /usr/bin
%
whatis *
FreeBSD includes many applications and utilities produced
by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). In addition to manual
pages, these programs may include hypertext documents called
info
files. These can be viewed using
info(1) or, if
editors/emacs
is
installed, the info mode of
emacs.
To use info(1), type:
%
info
For a brief introduction, type h
. For
a quick command reference, type ?
.
All FreeBSD documents are available for download at http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
Questions that are not answered by the
documentation may be
sent to <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>.
Send questions about this document to <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org>.