Unix Man Pages

Formatting a command

• anything in [] brackets indicates optional
• -- - signify end of command options. Only positional params are accepted after this point, such as which file will be targeted for the operation.
  • ex. say we want to grep for the string -v. If we just executed grep -v file.txt, the -v would be interpreted as an argument on grep. If we execute grep -- -v file.txt, -- tells us "ok, that's it. No more arguments accepted". Since the section after the args section is the pattern section, -v gets interpreted as a pattern.

Valid command form

• angle brackets for required parameters: ping <hostname>
• square brackets for optional parameters: mkdir [-p] <dirname>
• ellipses for repeated items: cp <source1> [source2…] <dest>
• vertical bars for choice of items: netstat {-t|-u}

Unix built-ins

use the manbash command to see man pages for built-ins (e.g. cd, eval)

• source