Finding knowledge

In much of the above discussion there is only a hint of how some of the useful

programs work for you to make using a Linux system possible. The Debian

system comes with much  on line  documentation. It is Debian Policy that

every program has a man page. In addition, many packages also provide info

pages.

How does this help when you may not even know the command name? Linux

also provides the apropos command. If you give apropos a word, it will search

certain portions of the man pages looking for that word. For instance the

command:

apropos printer

will produce output something like:

banner (6)   print large banner on printer

lpc (8)   line printer control program

lpd (8)   liner printer spooler daemon

lprm (1)   remove jobs from the line printer queue

pac (8)   printer/plotter accounting information

print (3ncurses)   ship binary data to printer

printcap (5)   printer capability data base

Thus apropos can lead you to the man page entry for the topic of interest. In

the previous list the command lpc looks interesting, and we didn't discuss it

when talking about printers. This program is mostly of interest to the System

Administrator, but that could be you, so take a look at the man page by

entering the command:

man lpc

The man program will format text to your screen through the pager assigned

to that task (the default is more). man recognizes the PAGER environment

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