THANK YOU!!
Have you ever wanted to know what the commands in these directories do:
/bin
/sbin
/usr/bin
There is a command called whatis and xargs, that can be used quite creatively to print out quick definitions of all the command in a directory.
Move to the bin directory of your choice and follow the example below:Code:ls | xargs whatis | less
These will print out the whatis for every command in the directory you are in so you can get a quick overview of the commands listed.Code:root@0[/]# cd /bin root@0[bin]# ls | xargs whatis | less afio (1) - manipulate archives and files arch (1) - print machine architecture ash (1) - a shell ash.static: nothing appropriate. bash (1) - GNU Bourne-Again SHell bsd-csh (1) - a shell (command interpreter) with C-like syntax bsh (1) - a shell cat (1) - concatenate files and print on the standard output chgrp (1) - change group ownership etc... etc... etc...
Enjoy!
THANK YOU!!
No problem!
This was a tip I learned a few years ago (I think) and it just popped back into my brain so I thought I would share it.
I like "dpkg -l |less"
On a Debian system this will give you a list of all the packages you have installed on your machine with descriptions of what the package does.
For example:
ii 3270-common 3.2.17-2 Common files for IBM 3270 emulators {x,c,s,t
ii a2ps 4.13b-20 GNU a2ps - 'Anything to PostScript' converte
ii aalib-bin 1.4p5-17 sample programs using aalib
ii aalib1 1.4p5-17 ascii art library
ii abiword 1.9.0+cvs.2003 WYSIWYG word processor based on GTK2
ii abiword-common 1.9.0+cvs.2003 WYSIWYG word processor based on GTK2
ii ace-of-penguin 1.2-5 Solitaire-games with penguin-look
ii acme 2.0.3-1 Enables the "multimedia buttons" found on la
ii acroread 5.06-0.4 Adobe Acrobat Reader: Portable Document Form
ii adduser 3.50 Add and remove users and groups
The nice thing about this is that it also gives you the version of the package you have installed.
If you want to look up just one package, you can do this "dpkg -l packagename"
Ex. "dpkg -l cpio" yeilds
cpio 2.5-1 GNU cpio -- a program to manage archives of files.
polish translation of this article / polskie t?umaczenie tego artyku?u
http://debiandiary.aso.strefa.pl/vie...asc&highlight=
xargs isn't necessary. You could do something like the following:
The backticks around ls are expanded out to the output of the command. Therefore, if you had a directory consisting of two files, foo and bar, `ls` would expand out to "foo bar". The full command, after being fully expanded, in this case, would be:Code:whatis `ls` |more
Code:whatis foo bar |more
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