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Man pages

Man pages (Manual Pages) are in system documentation covering how to use Unix commands. They are available via the man command:

man ls

    LS(1)                                          User Commands

    NAME
        ls - list directory contents

    SYNOPSIS
        ls [OPTION]... [FILE]...

    DESCRIPTION
        List  information about the FILEs (the current directory by default).
        Sort entries alphabetically if none of -cftuvSUX nor --sort is specified.

        Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

        -a, --all
                do not ignore entries starting with .

        -A, --almost-all
                do not list implied . and ..

        --author
                with -l, print the author of each file

The manual page provides a full list of arguments and often include examples as well:

man find

    EXAMPLES
        find /tmp -name core -type f -print | xargs /bin/rm -f

        Find files named core in or below the directory /tmp and delete them.  Note that this will  work  incorrectly
        if there are any filenames containing newlines, single or double quotes, or spaces.

        find /tmp -name core -type f -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f

        Find files named core in or below the directory /tmp and delete them, processing filenames in such a way that
        file or directory names containing single or double quotes, spaces or newlines are  correctly  handled.   The
        -name test comes before the -type test in order to avoid having to call stat(2) on every file.

        find . -type f -exec file '{}' \;

        Runs  `file'  on every file in or below the current directory.  Notice that the braces are enclosed in single
        quote marks to protect them from interpretation as shell script punctuation.  The semicolon is similarly pro‐
        tected by the use of a backslash, though single quotes could have been used in that case also.

Man pages are available for most Unix commands / programs from cp to vim.

Man page navigation

By default man uses less as a pager so this section applies to less, further information can be found using man less.

Navigating the page

You can use the up and down arrow keys or page up and page down keys.

Finding text in the man page

Searching can be accomplished with the / key. To search the man page for less for the term 'search':

man less
/search

Then press enter, this will search forward through the page for the search term.

Exiting man

To exit type q

Univa Grid Engine Man Pages

Univa Grid Engine has extensive man pages for all its commands and settings, manpages of interest to users include:

  • sge_intro
  • qstat
  • qsub

Run man followed by the command above to see its man page (e.g. man qsub).