HP NonStop G-Series - Manual (Page 54)

Utilities Reference Manual and in the online reference pages (sometimes called man pages). Each
reference page documents a single command or utility.
Beginning with the J06.14 and H06.25 RVUs, the OSS Core Utilities product (T1202) provides
additional Open Source utilities. For information about the OSS Core Utilities, including how to
view reference pages, see
OSS Core Utilities User Commands (page 185) .
The OSS online reference pages are in the following directories:
•
OSS Utilities (T8626) product: /usr/share/man
•
OSS Core Utilities (T1202) product: /usr/coreutils/share/man
The man Command
You can access the online reference pages using the man command. The basic format of the man
command is as follows:
man commandname
where commandname is the name of the command or utility you want information on. For example,
to display the reference page for the grep command, you would enter:
man grep
To scroll through a reference page that is longer than a single screen, use the Return key, the Next
Page key, or the arrow keys.
There are options you can use with the man command that allow you to specify alternatives to the
default source and output. The man command and its options are fully described in the reference
page for the man(1) command either online or in the Open System Services Shell and Utilities
Reference Manual.
Two additional commands display information about commands: whatis and apropos.
The whatis Command
The whatis command lists all the commands and functions whose names contain the string given
as an argument to whatis, followed by a brief description of each command’s main purpose.
The basic format for the whatis command is:
whatis argument
For example, to display information about all commands and functions whose names contain the
string man, enter:
whatis man
This command returns the following:
Treats command arguments as a single command. command(1)
Displays reference pages. man(1)
The whatis command returns information on all entries in the reference page database whose
names include the string specified in the argument to whatis. In the preceding example, man is
the argument to whatis and, in each of the entries returned, the string man appears in the name
of the command.
The apropos Command
The apropos command displays all commands and functions whose name or description contains
the string given as the argument to the apropos command, followed by a brief description. For
example
apropos more
54 OSS Commands and Utilities