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Find Help in Linux

The quickest way is using --help You can also use man man ls You can search in the man database with man -k

Man pages are categorized in different sections. The most relevant sections for system administrators are as follows:

  • 1: Executable programs or shell commands
  • 5: File formats and conventions
  • 8: System administration commands For example if your are looking for the command that an administrator would use to to create partitions, use man -k partition | grep 8

man -f (command) Displays a short description of the item found

To update the mandb database run: mandb

man -w ls Returns the location of the file where the page is rendered

Since RHEL 10 there is a new way to get help RHEL Lightspeed powered by AI. This tool won’t help in the RHCSA exam as you are offline

2 types of commands:

  • Internal command, also called shell builtin, is a command that is a part of the shell itself and doesn’t have to be loaded from disk separately
  • External command, exist in a executable file on the disk of the computer. Because it has to be read from disk the first time it is used, it is a bit slower.

To find out whether a command is a Bash internal or an executable file on disk, you can use the type command

The $PATH variable defines a list of directories that the shell searches for a matching filename You can also use which, which ls, to find out where the shell will get the ls command