Linux Dummies 9th

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Part VI: Appendixes
Getting help
When you’re digging around for help on a command, you can call on an interesting
range of shell commands for assistance, as shown in Table A-1.
Table A-1
Command
apropos
info
man
whatis
Purpose
Shell Help Commands
Looks for commands that contain a keyword in their man
page descriptions.
One way of finding help information. You can find instructions
for this tool at www.gnu.org/software/
texinfo/manual/info/, or you can use the built-in
tutorial by starting the info tool and pressing the H key
when inside it.
The primary way of getting help in Linux and UNIX.
Gets and displays a one-line description of a command.
Locating details about the command-prompt options of a command is a
never-ending pursuit. The man page system provides some helpful guides at
your fingertips for rapidly finding this detailed information.
Archiving and compressing
Although disk space isn’t as hard to come by as it once was, bandwidth and
backup media are still at a premium. Subsequently, this group of commands
provides a potpourri of tools for compacting and organizing data for storage,
as shown in Table A-2.
Table A-2
Command
bzip2
bunzip2
Archiving and Compressing Tools
Purpose
Compresses files into .bz2 format. Used mostly for
incredibly large sets of text files (which is what source
code actually is).
Uncompresses .bz2 files.