Where’s the manual for this thing?

This brings us to our next command: man. man is a short for manual page. If you type man [command name] you will receive the manual pages for that command. Now what about those instances where you do not know what the command is that you are looking to use. What then? Well, fortunately, man has a built-in search function. To use this, type man --K [what you are searching for] in the command prompt. This will pull up every manual page containing the word you searched. Nifty. For a full description of any of the commands and all of the options (i.e., what the -a, -F, and -l are for the list command) can be obtained by using the system manual.

kgoebber@bergeron:~> man ls

This will allow you to see the full documentation on the list command. Use man whenever you need to find out more information about a command or its uses.