For People New to Both FreeBSD and UNIX®
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# 4 Getting Help and Information

Here are some useful sources of help. `Text` stands for something of your choice that you type in—usually a command or filename.

`apropos `text``

  Everything containing string `text` in the whatis database.

`man `text``

  The manual page for `text`. The major source of documentation for UNIX® systems. `man `ls`` will tell you all the ways to use the `ls` command. Press Enter to move through text, Ctrl-B to go back a page, Ctrl-F to go forward, q or Ctrl-C to quit.

`which `text``

  Tells you where in the user's path the command `text` is found.

`locate `text``

  All the paths where the string `text` is found.

`whatis `text``

  Tells you what the command `text` does and its manual page. Typing `whatis *` will tell you about all the binaries in the current directory.

`whereis `text``

  Finds the file `text`, giving its full path.

You might want to try using `whatis` on some common useful commands like `cat`, `more`, `grep`, `mv`, `find`, `tar`, `chmod`, `chown`, `date`, and `script`. `more` lets you read a page at a time as it does in DOS, e.g., `ls -l | more` or `more `filename``. The `*` works as a wildcard—e.g., `ls w*` will show you files beginning with `w`.

Are some of these not working very well? Both locate(1) and whatis(1) depend on a database that is rebuilt weekly. If your machine is not going to be left on over the weekend (and running FreeBSD), you might want to run the commands for daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance now and then. Run them as `root` and, for now, give each one time to finish before you start the next one.

    # periodic daily
    output omitted
    # periodic weekly
    output omitted
    # periodic monthly
    output omitted

If you get tired of waiting, press Alt-F2 to get another virtual console, and log in again. After all, it is a multi-user, multi-tasking system. Nevertheless these commands will probably flash messages on your screen while they are running; you can type `clear` at the prompt to clear the screen. Once they have run, you might want to look at `/var/mail/root` and `/var/log/messages`.

Running such commands is part of system administration—and as a single user of a UNIX system, you are your own system administrator. Virtually everything you need to be `root` to do is system administration. Such responsibilities are not covered very well even in those big fat books on UNIX, which seem to devote a lot of space to pulling down menus in windows managers. You might want to get one of the two leading books on systems administration, either Evi Nemeth et.al.'s UNIX System Administration Handbook (Prentice-Hall, 1995, ISBN 0-13-15051-7)—the second edition with the red cover; or Æleen Frisch's Essential System Administration (O'Reilly & Associates, 2002, ISBN 0-596-00343-9). I used Nemeth.

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