Here are some useful sources of help.
Text stands for something of your
choice that you type in—usually a command or
filename.
apropos
textEverything containing string
text in the whatis
database.
man
textThe 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
textTells you where in the user's path the command
text is found.
locate
textAll the paths where the string
text is found.
whatis
textTells you what the command
text does and its manual page.
Typing whatis * will tell you about all
the binaries in the current directory.
whereis
textFinds 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 dailyoutput omitted#periodic weeklyoutput omitted#periodic monthlyoutput 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.
All FreeBSD documents are available for download at http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
Questions that are not answered by the
documentation may be
sent to <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>.
Send questions about this document to <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org>.