Intro to the CLI The man Command

Learning objective: By the end of this lesson, students will be able to utilize the man command and --help flag to access and interpret the manual pages and help information for various commands.

Each command has a different set of flags and arguments it accepts. We can easily view this information without leaving our terminal environment using a command.

The man command, short for manual, allows us to view a manual page for most commands.

For example, you can run man rm to view the list of flags that the rm command accepts.

Since man is also a command, you can even run man man to view more details about the man command.

Some commands may also have the --help or -h flag. This flag can be used to display the help information for some commands. See the Flags Lesson for more details about flags.