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11 votes

What does `LESS=+/EXAMPLE\:` mean?

It doesn't mean anything in bash. It's some arbitrary text that gets stored in the $LESS environment variable for that single command. But when you run less, it reads the contents of $LESS and ...
grawity_u1686's user avatar
9 votes

Man pages for Git Bash on Windows 7

I have stitched together some of the other answers to get a man command you can use like you would natively. Just stick the following in your .bashrc, and either source it, or re-open your terminal. ...
Pianosaurus's user avatar
7 votes

What does `LESS=+/EXAMPLE\:` mean?

As grawity's excellent answer indicates, it's a way of giving an instruction to the less pager. In this specific case, using the manual and tutorial of GNU Parallel, it makes reading the examples easy....
bertieb's user avatar
  • 7,475
6 votes

What does "wc --files0-from=F" mean in linux command

read input from the files specified ... in file F Instead of supplying the filenames to wc on the command line, read them from file F. NUL-terminated names The file names in file F must be ...
Mike Fitzpatrick's user avatar
5 votes

Searching for a specific option in a man page

Easiest way to jump to a specific option if you want to look up the 1 letter code: type 3 spaces then the option using the "/" man search feature. For example, let's say we want to jump to ...
j7skov's user avatar
  • 151
4 votes

show man pages in terminal without a pager

To expand on on Arjan's Answer, you can get formatting using cat as a pager if you pipe it to ul: man foo -P cat | ul
bowmasters's user avatar
4 votes

Running `whatis cd` always returns "nothing appropriate" on Ubuntu 18.04

cd is a builtin shell command: $ type cd cd is a shell builtin The documentation for cd can be found with: man builtins Run it then press / and search for "cd". In Bash you can also open a help ...
Eduardo Baitello's user avatar
3 votes

show man pages in terminal without a pager

I fact I went a different route because I realised my 'real problem' was with less clearing the screen on exit. I put export MANPAGER='/usr/bin/less -isXF' in my startup profile. The -X parameter ...
Chris F Carroll's user avatar
3 votes

Where's the man page for the `sizeof` C function?

You can use man -wK 'sizeof' | sort -u to find the articles that contain sizeof, but that'll return a lot of results. However notice that every article about something will have that thing as a ...
phuclv's user avatar
  • 28.4k
2 votes

Man pages for Git Bash on Windows 7

In addition to Sathya's answer, you could also do this in bash for Windows: curl -v --silent "http://man.he.net/?topic=<command_name>&section=all" 2>&1 | sed -n "/<PRE>/,/<\/...
mr5's user avatar
  • 166
2 votes

How to jump to a particular flag in a Unix manpage?

When searching for flags, I have usually gone with akostadinov's answer, and typed / -flag in less, but this isn't usually accurate. To search for a flag with a more robust pattern without having to ...
Lucas Payne's user avatar
2 votes

Open a protected file form within man page/less?

You can run an arbitrary command in man/less with an exclamation mark ("!"). Type !sudo less .../service.xml and press Enter to open a new less session as root within your unprivileged man or less.
Deltik's user avatar
  • 19.7k
2 votes

View man pages via Emacs

Starting a new Emacs every time you want to view a man page is an unusual workflow. Most commonly people prefer to re-use a running Emacs: emacsclient --no-wait -e '(man "man")' If you truly insist ...
sds's user avatar
  • 2,060
1 vote
Accepted

Is there a `man/` equivalent of $PATH (which is for extra `bin/` directories)?

The "equivalent" of $PATH is $MANPATH. See man 1 man: MANPATH If $MANPATH is set, its value is used as the path to search for manual pages. See the SEARCH PATH section of manpath(5) for the ...
1 vote

Where is there a manual page for Command Line Editing shortcuts?

The source for many GNU/Linux distros is ReadLine but you may find other alternatives elsewhere. Unfortunately, as it's a library for other programs, it doesn't always come with a manpage for end-...
gildux's user avatar
  • 272
1 vote

Update issue with mandb and makewhatis

How can I change a manpage and have this change reflected by apropos and whatis? You should be using mandb - create or update the manual page index caches. mandb is used to initialise or manually ...
DavidPostill's user avatar
  • 159k
1 vote

Bringing up all man page sections for a program at once

To directly answer the question: man -a (whatever) may be what you're looking for - this will sequentially and interactively bring up all man pages that match the text you enter, but it will likely ...
Karu's user avatar
  • 4,772
1 vote

"WARNING: terminal is not fully functional" when using "man" as root

I ended up solving this myself by adding a missing ncurses package which provides /usr/share/terminfo. This package, which for whatever reason of package dependency hell, wasn't installed, seems to ...
Joshua Boniface's user avatar
1 vote
Accepted

man <whatever> opens vim with hidden characters displayed

man calls a program defined as pager. On OS X it uses the one defined in PAGER environment variable. Use: export PAGER=less to set it to less. You should also look in your rc-scripts to find the ...
techraf's user avatar
  • 4,910
1 vote

How to read PowerShell Documentation Syntax

man Update-Help First keep in mind that man (really Get-Help) will not show you the full help that is available for the commandlet by default. The basic output, simply doesn't give you what you need ...
Zoredache's user avatar
  • 20.1k
1 vote

Searching for a specific option in a man page

This is the function I use to display the option description and command description. #!/usr/bin/env bash usage() { cat <<EOF Name: manop Description: This script outputs a command ...
shinokada's user avatar
  • 2,625
1 vote

Man pages for Git Bash on Windows 7

If anyone else is trying to get man to work on Windows and is using Msys2, here is what I found: I got very close by using the answer above which says to install groff (available via pacman) and then ...
TT--'s user avatar
  • 334
1 vote

Man pages for Git Bash on Windows 7

The answer, from this question, might be helpful: Gives you info for the command right in the bash window. Git command Quick Reference git [command] -help Opens the online info for the ...
Justin's user avatar
  • 21
1 vote

How can I install C++ man pages manually?

cppreference.com has archives. in order to install the man pages (git), one can do the following : git clone https://github.com/jeaye/stdman.git cd stdman ./configure sudo make install by default, ...
Spyros's user avatar
  • 153

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