CLI Help

[bigpup]

Written by smokey01

Command Line Interface Help.

When working in a terminal or CLI you can get some help by simply typing help. A list of commands will be displayed. To expand in the help type help and the command you would like additional help. EG: help echo

For many commands in Linux there are also man pages. In a terminal type man echo to get help on the echo command.

I don't know if pman is still included in official Pups but it was a modified version of man that displayed the information in a web browser.

Another interesting command from a terminal is TAB TAB. Yes that means press the tab key twice in a terminal. This will give you the option to display a list of all your executable commands. This includes all binaries and scripts.

[cobaka]

I use the CLI a lot. probably 20% of my time is at the cli.

YouTube and google are useful sources of info.
The CLI has a 'line memory'. Hit up-arrow and you will see the last command you typed.
You can scroll back thru dozens of 'last commands'. Down-arrow traverses the command history to more recent lines.

You can edit that command and re-play it, with mods.
The 'tab' key (at times) will fill in details for you.
example: If you are using the 'grep' search comment and you are typing in the path - TAB will auto-complete (when there is but a single option available.
if you type <command> --help, then you'll see a cryptic notation of the parameters associated with the command.
Try, for example, ls --help, or sort --help

cobaka

[user1111]

For many commands in Linux there are also man pages. In a terminal type man echo to get help on the echo command.

IIRC Puppy's strip out a lot of man type help ... which helps with reducing the overall size, to instead link man pages to online references. Online help is OK, but more often not specific to the actual system/version you're running. One thing I like with OpenBSD is their approach towards documentation being as important as actual code i.e. a man page error in detail could cause system issues, and as such a 'bug' in man pages is considered as critical as a bug in code, and where changes in programs has to have a equal change in the associated man pages. So you get very refined/specific details for each/any version of the OS that you run.

Local documentation is also good for such cases as when you might not be net connected. Trying to get help from online sources about how to connect is awkward to say the least.