Commands using man sorted by votes

Commands using man (67)

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Quick access to the ascii table.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
251

man ascii

ntheother · 2009-03-31 10:29:20 37
Show File System Hierarchy

Curious about differences between /bin, /usr/bin, and /usr/local/bin? What should be in the /sbin dir? Try this command to find out. Tested against Red Hat & OS X
This is sample output - yours may be different.
95

man hier

haivu · 2010-01-26 16:31:05 39
Create a pdf version of a manpage

Quick and dirty version. I made a version that checks if a manpage exists (but it's not a oneliner). You must have ps2pdf and of course Ghostscript installed in your box. Enhancements appreciated :-)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
59

man -t manpage | ps2pdf - filename.pdf

TetsuyO · 2010-12-19 22:40:18 19
RTFM function

RTFMFTW.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
42

rtfm() { help $@ || man $@ || $BROWSER "http://www.google.com/search?q=$@"; }

hunterm · 2011-01-05 02:53:38 325
read manpage of a unix command as pdf in preview (Os X)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
25

man -t UNIX_COMMAND | open -f -a preview

vranx · 2009-02-24 13:12:16 44
Start a new command in a new screen window

If you are already running screen then you often want to start a command in a fresh window. You use this alias by typing 's whatever' from your command line and 'whatever' starts running in a new window. Good with interactive commands like info, vim, and nethack.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
19

alias s='screen -X screen'; s top; s vi; s man ls;

jonty · 2009-02-05 13:47:14 39
save man-page as pdf
This is sample output - yours may be different.
17

man -t awk | ps2pdf - awk.pdf

kev · 2011-11-23 01:40:23 9
Convert "man page" to text file

You can convert any UNIX man page to .txt
This is sample output - yours may be different.
15

man ls | col -b > ~/Desktop/man_ls.txt

vigo · 2009-06-13 11:49:33 18
A function to output a man page as a pdf file

Tested on Fedora 12. This function will take a man page and convert it to pdf, saving the output to the current working directory. In Gnome, you can then view the output with "gnome-open file.pdf", or your favorite pdf viewer.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
15

function man2pdf(){ man -t ${1:?Specify man as arg} | ps2pdf -dCompatibility=1.3 - - > ${1}.pdf; }

SuperFly · 2009-11-27 12:49:49 13
What is the use of this switch ?

e.g. manswitch grep -o This will take you to the relevant part of the man page, so you can see the description of the switch underneath.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
15

manswitch () { man $1 | less -p "^ +$2"; }

dbh · 2011-08-19 16:44:48 13
RTFM function

Some commands have more information on 'info' than in the man pages
This is sample output - yours may be different.
9

rtfm() { help $@ || info $@ || man $@ || $BROWSER "http://www.google.com/search?q=$@"; }

seattlegaucho · 2011-01-05 21:26:51 44
Open a man page as a PDF in Gnome

Would be better if gnome-open would accept std in Should be doable in KDE - anyone?
This is sample output - yours may be different.
8

TF=`mktemp` && man -t YOUR_COMMAND >> $TF && gnome-open $TF

furicle · 2009-02-18 15:18:35 9
See The MAN page for the last command

This works in bash. The "!!:0" limits the argument to man to be only the first word of the last command. "!!:1" would be the second, etc.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
8

man !!:0

stubby · 2010-08-14 15:38:55 10
Save man pages to pdf
This is sample output - yours may be different.
7

man -t man | ps2pdf - > man.pdf

hemanth · 2009-07-29 16:57:14 7
Give to anyone a command to immediatly find a particular part of a man.

Example : LC_ALL=C man less | less +/ppattern
This is sample output - yours may be different.
6

man <COMMAND> | less +'/pattern'

sputnick · 2010-01-26 20:50:00 4
Play musical notes from octave of middle C

Are there any creative pieces of music that can be created using beep and the shell? I'd love to hear it!
This is sample output - yours may be different.
5

man beep | sed -e '1,/Note/d; /BUGS/,$d' | awk '{print $2}' | xargs -IX sudo beep -f X -l 500

jnash · 2009-04-01 06:48:48 11
Open up a man page as PDF (#OSX)

Simply pass an argument to the script to convert the manual page to a PDF: man2pdf drutil
This is sample output - yours may be different.
4

function man2pdf(){ man -t ${1:?Specify man as arg} | open -f -a preview; }

piXelz · 2009-02-16 18:29:35 1069
Print out a man page

man -t manpagename gives a postscript version of said man page. You then pipe it to ls, and assuming you have cups set up, it prints in your default printer. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
Check your printer
```
4

man -t man | lp

icco · 2009-03-24 19:08:07 7
List commands with a short summary

Obviously, you can replace 'man' command with any command in this command line to do useful things. I just want to mention that there is a way to list all the commands which you can execute directly without giving fullpath. Normally all important commands will be placed in your PATH directories. This commandline uses that variable to get commands. Works in Ubuntu, will work in all 'manpage' configured *nix systems. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
$ find `echo "${PATH}" | tr ':' ' '` -type f -a -name '*ctl*' | while read COMMAND; do man -f "${COMMAND##*/}"; done
cupsctl (8)          - configure cupsd.conf options
pactl (1)            - Control a running PulseAudio sound server
esdctl (1)           - The Enlightened Sound Daemon
sysctl (8)           - configure kernel parameters at runtime
alsactl (1)          - advanced controls for ALSA soundcard driver
pccardctl (8)        - PCMCIA card control utility
initctl (8)          - init daemon control utility
```
4

find `echo "${PATH}" | tr ':' ' '` -type f | while read COMMAND; do man -f "${COMMAND##*/}"; done

mohan43u · 2009-06-13 19:56:24 6
Introduction to user commands

Tested on debian and ubuntu. Translations could be useless, so "LANG=C man intro" is a better alternative.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
4

man intro

peppet · 2010-02-17 10:11:56 6
RTFM function

Sometimes you don't have man pages only '-h' or '--help'.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
4

rtfm() { help $@ || $@ -h || $@ --help || man $@ || $BROWSER "http://www.google.com/search?q=$@"; }

karol · 2011-01-05 17:36:26 4

Search manpages for a keyword. Very useful when you don't know where to find the information. Show Sample Output

man -k <keyword>

raphink · 2009-02-16 15:28:57 787

Alias to edit and source your .bashrc file

Place the line above in your ~/.bahsrc file. Now every time you issue the 'vb' command, you invoke the vim editor to edit it, then source it so the changes take effect immediately. Notes: * This mechanism is not working well if your .bashrc contains commands that should not be sourced more than once. * This trick also work for your csh or tclsh users: place the following line in your ~/.cshrc file: alias vc 'vim ~/.cshrc; source ~/.cshrc Thank you adzap for pointing out the missing quote
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2

alias vb='vim ~/.bashrc; source ~/.bashrc'

haivu · 2009-03-02 21:01:49 8
Colorful man

Colourful with vim regex finding goodness! Replace the 'man' with the page to be looked up. I actually have as a function in my .profile function vman { /usr/bin/man $* | /usr/bin/col -b | /usr/bin/iconv -c | view -c 'set ft=man nomod nolist nospell nonu' -
This is sample output - yours may be different.
2

/usr/bin/man man | /usr/bin/col -b | /usr/bin/iconv -c | view -c 'set ft=man nomod nolist nospell nonu

furicle · 2010-01-04 18:35:42 7
Show sections of a man page.

Uses the formatting of a man page to show an outline of its headers and sub-headers. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
LS(1)
NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
   Exit status:
AUTHOR
REPORTING BUGS
COPYRIGHT
SEE ALSO
GNU coreutils 7.4 
```
2

man ls | egrep "^([A-Z]| [A-Z])"

bartonski · 2013-01-09 17:12:03 6
1 2 3 >

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Recursively remove all files in a CVS directory

This will search all directories and ignore the CVS ones. Then it will search all files in the resulting directories and act on them.

Show memory stats on Nexenta/Solaris

Insert the last argument of the previous command

list block devices

Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Add to Instapaper

Adds URL to Instapaper. Usage: instapaper-add user@example.com 12345 http://www.commandlinefu.com/

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)

swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

pretend to be busy in office to enjoy a cup of coffee

using seq inside a subshell instead of a bash sequence to create increments.

Create md5sum of files under the current dir excluding some directories

Useful if you want get all the md5sum of files but you want exclude some directories. If your list of files is short you can make in one command as follow: $ find . -type d $ -name DIR1 -o -name DIR2 $ -prune -o -type f -exec md5sum {} \; Alternatively you can specify a different command to be executed on the resulting files.

Use color grep by default

Alias the grep command to show colored results by default.

get all Google ipv4 subnets for a iptables firewall for example

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Commands using man (67)

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