When I open up the manual for a command (man wget
for example) the manual can be many hundreds of lines long. How can I get:
- to the end of the manual quickly and
- back to my terminal prompt?
When I open up the manual for a command (man wget
for example) the manual can be many hundreds of lines long. How can I get:
When inside of the document viewer through the man command, press h or H in order to view the man's help.
From man's help screen:
Another good idea would be to press the Home or the End keys. :)
Good luck!
The normal ways to do this have been suggested (see @geppettvs-dconstanzo's answer). This leaves numerous unnatural, wrong, and bad ways.
So I'll deal with a couple of those.
First, you don't have to read the man pages from a terminal (even though it will make you a better person). You can read them in html, for instance.
You can generate the html yourself from the sources on your system, but it's easier to go to manpages.ubuntu.com .
Here's the hefty
bash
page, turned into light and fluffy web-renderable html :The Bash Manpage from manpages.ubuntu.com
Here's a hack that can actually be useful : use
tail
to slice off some number of lines from the end of the man page output, and view that.Least usefully, most trivally:
might be useful :
(or
man bash | tail -1500 | less
)More useful (if contrived):
Of course, this is what I'd do:
man tac | tac | less
(Although you might start out reading
man tac
forwards.)Some handy easy-to-remember less (and thus man) commands:
Hope that helps (:
Press G
Press q
You can type
man less
to get more information.