Module Release July 2003: Local System Documentation

This month's offering concentrates on Linux's online documentation.

LPI 101 Objective 1.108.1 (“Use and manage local system documentation&8221;) asks you to:

“use and administer the man facility and the material in /usr/share/doc/ … includ[ing] finding relevant man pages, searching man page sections, finding commands and man pages related to them, and configuring access to man sources and the man system.”

In addition to covering these points, the module itself provides a significant amount of advice about the real world practice of finding, mixing and matching of documentation in many forms, and about the many gotchas lying in wait for the naïve user. In particular, the module explains why the system manual and /usr/share/doc are often insufficient and where to find alternative or supplementary documentation, depending on the application and the type of information required. Subsequent modules will deal with internet documentation sources, documentation writing and providing online user support.

Because LPIC1 doesn't yet require any knowledge of the Gnome or KDE application help systems, and because they are very simple hypertext systems directly accessed from the GUI application concerned, they are not covered in this module.

Perhaps the most useful feature of this module is its fairly extensive explanation of how to find appropriate information in an appropriate man page for your problem. Examples include use of: whatis to find out what a named command does; apropos to find commands related to a search term; man -k to search through the text of all man pages, and man -a to find all the different manual sections dealing with the same command.

A particularly useful part of the explanation about how find appropriate information covers moving, navigating and searching within man pages using the interactive commands of the less paging tool and the subsections which structure man pages. Many Unix newcomers take some time to adjust to the fact that the manual is not a separate application, but merely a collection of formatted text files categorised by use (e.g., system administrator vs user pages) and presented using a paging application like less, i.e., you need to know less commands in order to move around man pages effectively. Users of jurassic Unix systems typically employ a very limited paging tool called more. They will find less significantly more powerful and efficient.