Terminal Tips: Man Pages

If you are tinkering around in the Terminal and you want to learn something new about one of the command line programs or functions, one of the easiest methods available is via the manual pages or man pages. Launch the Terminal and type man man to launch man and open the manual pages for the manual page reader man.
Confused yet?

Each manual normally contains a description of the command along with a list of the different variables you can run alongside it. Once you are viewing manual pages simply hit the space bar to move forward through the documentation and q to quit. To learn more about bash, the GNU Bourne-Again SHell, which is the default shell running inside the Terminal in Panther, simply type man bash and return. If you are curious to learn more about
top, which I discussed yesterday, type man top and then hit return. Have fun reading!