$ apropos partition
diskdumpfmt (8) - format a dump device or a partition
fdisk (8) - Partition table manipulator for Linux
GNU Parted [parted] (8) - a partition manipulation program
mpartition (1) - partition an MSDOS hard disk
MPI_Cart_sub (3) - Partitions a communicator into subgroups which form
lower-dimensional cartesian subgrids
partprobe (8) - inform the OS of partition table changes
pvcreate (8) - initialize a disk or partition for use by LVM
sfdisk (8) - Partition table manipulator for Linux
To find a command and its documentation, you can use the whereis command. For example, if you are looking for the fdisk command, you can do this:
$ whereis fdisk
fdisk: /sbin/fdisk /usr/share/man/man8/fdisk.8.gz
Using Man Pages
To learn more about a command or program, use the man command, followed by the name of the command. Man pages for Linux and X Window commands are within the /usr/share/man, /usr/local/share/man, and /usr/X11R6/man directories. So, for example, to read the rm command's man page, use the man command like this:
$ man rm
After you press Enter, the less command (a Linux command known as a h to get help, use the forward slash to enter a search string, or press q to quit.
Although nearly all the hundreds of GNU commands included with Linux each have a man page, you must use the info command to read detailed information about using a GNU command. For example, to learn even more about bash (which has a rather extensive manual page), use the info command like this:
$ info bash
Press the n and p keys to navigate through the document, or scroll down to a menu item on the screen and press Enter to read about a specific feature. Press q to quit reading.
The following programs and built-in shell commands are commonly used when working at the command line. These commands are organized by category to help you under stand the command's purpose. If you need to find full information for using the command, you can find that information under the command's man page.
> Managing users and groups — chage, chfn, chsh, edquota, gpasswd, groupadd, groupdel, groupmod, groups, mkpasswd, newgrp, newusers, passwd, umask, useradd, userdel, usermod
> Managing files and file systems — cat, cd, chattr, chmod, chown, compress, cp, dd, fdisk, find, gzip, ln, mkdir, mksfs, mount, mv, rm, rmdir, rpm, sort, swapon, swapoff, tar, touch, umount, uncompress, uniq, unzip, zip
> Managing running programs — bg, fg, kill, killall, nice, ps, pstree, renice, top , watch
> Getting information — apropos, cal, cat, cmp, date, diff, df, dir, dmesg, du, env, file, free, grep, head, info, last, less, locate, ls, lsattr, man, more, pinfo, ps, pwd, stat, strings, tac, tail, top, uname, uptime, vdir, vmstat, w, wc, whatis, whereis, which, who, whoami
> Console text editors — ed, jed, joe, mcedit, nano, red, sed, vim
> Console Internet and network commands — bing, elm, ftp, host, hostname, ifconfig, links, lynx, mail, mutt, ncftp, netconfig, netstat, pine, ping, pump, rdate, route, scp, sftp, ssh, tcpdump, traceroute, whois, wire-test
Reference
This section lists some additional points of reference with background information on the standards and commands discussed in this chapter. Browse these links to learn more about some of the concepts discussed in this chapter and to expand your knowledge of your new Linux community:
> http://www.winntmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?rticleID=7420 — An article by a Windows NT user who, when experimenting with Linux, blithely confesses to rebooting the system after not knowing how to read a text file at the Linux console.
> http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/posix/ — IEEE's POSIX information page.
> http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2362/lw-01-government/#sidebar — Discussion of Linux and POSIX compliance.
> http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ — Home page for the Linux FHS, Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.
> http://www.tldp.org/ — Browse the HOWTO section to find and read The Linux
