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To: Gordon Wang <guelph@tpts5.seed.net.tw>
Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, dkelly@hiwaay.net, kent@erlang.ericsson.se
Subject: Re: Help 
Reply-To: kent@erlang.ericsson.se
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 05 Jul 1997 00:47:49 -0500"
References: <199707050547.AAA11695@nexgen.hiwaay.net>
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Date: Sun, 06 Jul 1997 00:22:35 +0200
From: Kent Boortz <kent@erlang.ericsson.se>
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Gordon, the way to find out what to do in Unix is to use the "man"
pages. Do

  % man man

to find out how it works (space key take you to the next page). To
find information for a command do

  % man command

If you don't know the name of the command you look for you can do

  % man -k your_search_string

This will list commands that contain this string in the short
description. Unfortunately you may still fail to find the right
command. When I'm desperate I sometimes "grep" for it in the man
directorys (may look silly to you Unix gurus but give me a better
suggestion for how to do it ;-)

  % zgrep mypattern /usr/share/man/man?/* | less
  % zgrep mypattern /usr/local/man/man?/* | less
  % zgrep mypattern /usr/X11R6/man/man?/* | less

And of cause there may be cases where there are no direct equivalent
of a DOS command in Unix and you have to combine several Unix commands
to do the same thing.  These can be combined and named with the
"alias" command to form new commands.

Another way to find information about some of the commands
is the "info" system. Do

  % info

Use arrow keys and 'return' to select, 'u' for up, 'n' for next...

And, if this isn't enough, I use searches on the Web.  Finally, If
all other things fail, I look in the source code ;-)

dkelly@hiwaay.net wrote:

> Another fun way to use find:
> 
> % find / -name "file*" -exec ls -l "{}" \;
> 
> I won't explain that one. For more examples of find, see /etc/daily and 
> /etc/weekly.

David, you started it ;-)

To search lots of files in and below the current directory for a
specific string I have seen others use

  % find . -name "*.c" -exec grep mypattern {} \; -print

But a *much* more efficient way to do it is

  % find . -name "*.c" -print | xargs grep mypattern

I won't explain this one ;-)

/kgb