Introduction

One of the essential reflexes every new Linux user must develop is the reflex to search for information when something's amiss. But despite the fact that we live in a connected world, with search engines, wikis and huge quantities of information at our fingertips, it's always good to have the info we need already installed on the system we're working on. This makes for easy and fast access, and also for higher availability, should we lack access to an Internet connection. Besides, one can't always trust what one finds on the Web, and the manual pages are available in a consistent form, ready to answer questions to the impatient. One of the design philosophies standing behind Unix, and by inheritance Linux as well, is that the system should be well documented. This is how man pages came into being. While all Unix-based OSs have man pages, there are differences between them, so what works on Linux might not work on Solaris, for example. There is an issue, though: the writing style of these pages is terse, minute, impatient to the newcomer, so you might want to read a manpage a few times until you get accustomed.