From the course: Linux Bash Shells and Scripts: Streamlining Tasks and Enhancing Workflows with Automation

Exploring the Bash documentation - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Linux Bash Shells and Scripts: Streamlining Tasks and Enhancing Workflows with Automation

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Exploring the Bash documentation

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- [Instructor] Let's talk about Bash, of course. And Bash has lots of features, lots of commands, lots of all kinds of different things you can do, all kinds of subtle things. So, it could be a lifetime journey, learning Bash. We're going to talk about some good stuff in this course, of course, but you really do need documentation from time to time. And there is handy online documentation to go along with any sort of internet searches you might do, maybe use a machine learning platform to help you with Bash. But the man page for Bash can be handy. It is quite long. If you were to print it all out, it might be 100 pages. If you do like documents formatted more in the form of a book, then the official reference manual is for you. And here's the URL for that. It's from the Gnu Organization. But let's look at the man command and the info command for Bash. So we can say man bash, and we see the man page. In the upper left hand corner you can see Bash with the one in parentheses. The one means it's, the man page is coming from section one, which is where commands are. And, you can scroll through the man page with the space bar to do a page at a time, or the enter key to do a line at a time. And you can search for things by hitting forward slash. Type in a string and then it'll find that, for example. And then you get out of the man command with a queue. The info command for some things shows different information, but info for Bash just shows you the man page. So, there's no good difference there. If you want to get an idea of how long the man page is, we can count the number of lines with this piping into wc -l, and if this pipe or this wc -l is new, then that's good 'cause we're going to be talking about those to some length later on. But just know this is going to count the number of lines in the command and it's a little over 5,000 lines. So you could do the math there of how many pages that might be.

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