Manuals are available for most of the programs that run on the systems.
To access these 'man' pages type the following command at the shell prompt:
man command
You can advance the text by hitting the space bar. You can make the text scroll back with the "b" key.
Replace command with the UNIX command you wish to get help on.
You may also get help on using the 'man' pages by using the following command:
man man
Note square brackets like [ and ] are used to indicate optional arguements.
For example, the man page says "alias [-p] [name[=value] ...]" to compactly refer to several usages of the alias command.
alias see what aliases are set
alias name see what the alias for 'name' is set to
alias name=value set the alias for 'name' to 'value'
There's also a convention of using the pipe character | for mutually exclusive options.
For example, the man page for the change directory command 'cd' shows it's usage as "cd [-L|-P] [dir]". The -L and -P are both optional, and shouldn't occur together.
