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Ask Ubuntu

Questions tagged [documentation]

For questions regarding written documentation such as manuals, help files, policies, instructions, or guides.

Consulting the "man-pages" within the terminal:

Example

man bash

results

NAME
       bash - GNU Bourne-Again SHell

SYNOPSIS
       bash [options] [file]

COPYRIGHT
       Bash is Copyright (C) 1989-2011 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
230 questions
121
votes
3 answers

What is the difference between "man" and "info" documentation?

Regarding man-pages and info help documentation: Why do two such similar sources of documentation exist? Sometimes a man-page is available and the info is not; or vice-versa. I haven't yet latched on to the rhyme and reason behind it. Maybe there…
Peter.O
  • 25,251
69
votes
6 answers

Remove documentation to save hard drive space

I like to create a rather small Ubuntu installation in a Virtual Box machine. It should basically just provide TeX Live and related tools. I figured now that I have almost 1GB of data under /usr/share/doc. I don't need this documentation in this…
Martin Scharrer
  • 1,345
54
votes
7 answers

How are typical users expected to read the documentation in /usr/share/doc?

I recently learned that there is a huge pile of documentation in /usr/share/doc. It seems like much of it is gzipped so that it is not directly accessible without administrative privileges: $ gunzip examples/letter.tex.gz gzip: examples/letter.tex:…
ændrük
  • 78,496
52
votes
4 answers

Do files at /etc/apt/sources.list.d need to have an extension '.list'?

In /etc/apt/sources.list.d I have several files for custom repositories. All the names of those files end with .list. Is it obligatory that files in that folder should end with that extension? If yes, where is that information written?
bessarabov
  • 2,022
38
votes
9 answers

How can I get help on terminal commands?

I often see things like read man xyz For more information read xyz's man page. see info xyz so I wonder: How can I get help on terminal commands generally? What exactly are these man and info pages? How can I find and view them?
dessert
  • 40,956
28
votes
3 answers

What advantages does markdown have over asciidoc?

I've been using Asciidoc ever since I discovered it and use it a lot to be my defacto README text file. It's readable in text and it can output all kinds of other formats, like man pages, pdf, html, etc. Lately I've been seeing more and more…
csgeek
  • 1,659
26
votes
3 answers

"No manual entry for pthread" - could not find man page by name

I am new to Ubuntu, wanted to code for reader-writer block in Operating System, but when I fired the command man pthread it gave me an error no manual entry for pthread. What can be done to resolve the problem?
Barkha Dhamechai
  • 293
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25
votes
1 answer

In 'apt-cache depends' output, what is the meaning of Suggests, Recommends, |, <>?

I've checked the man/info page, but there is no reference to some aspects of the output fomat of apt-cache depends The man/info page tried to be helpful (in an obtuse manner); quote: "For the specific meaning of the remainder of the output it is…
Peter.O
  • 25,251
21
votes
5 answers

Ubuntu 14.04 QtCreator Qt5 examples missing

After upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04 I removed the official qtcreator in order to install the modified version from the software center because I'd like to try the SDK. Fortunately, the docs are now included in the official installation. Unfortunately,…
Nick Lehmann
  • 733
21
votes
5 answers

zsh man page documentation missing in packages?

I have a newly installed xubuntu 13.10 x64. I decided to install zsh via synaptic and make it my default shell. The installed zsh's version is: zsh 5.0.2 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu). The installed zsh looks ok, but there seems to be no man documentation…
Max Popp
  • 411
21
votes
1 answer

What does the kernel taint value mean?

Running cat /proc/sys/kernel/tainted prints the current kernel taint value (in base 10). My understanding is that this value is a bitfield, where each bit indicates the absence or presence of a particular type of taint. You can extract the bits…
Mechanical snail
  • 5,465
20
votes
1 answer

Where is the kernel documentation?

In CentOS I can do yum install kernel-doc and then read /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt. How would I do the equivalent in Ubuntu? Professor Google told me it was in the source code so I did apt install linux-source but…
snickered
  • 303
20
votes
4 answers

Are there any GUI man page editors are available?

I find the man page format extremely painful to write. Is there a GUI (WYSIWYG or WYSIWYM) editor available to make this task easier? I'm hoping for an application that is to man pages as Kompozer is to web pages. I have tried gmanedit but have…
dv3500ea
  • 37,734
18
votes
7 answers

How do I view the man pages?

I'm new to Linux. I got the "Unix And Linux System Administration Handbook" It speaks of several verisons of linux and unix, and the commands for viewing linux man pages and not specific to ubuntu. How do I view the manpages?
user127220
  • 181
18
votes
1 answer

Is there a detailed API documentation on the python binding for appindicator?

I'm getting serous with a project of my own and need a good documentation on the appindicator module for python. What I've found so far: API documentation on dev.ubuntu.com Community wiki entry API documentation on the C code Nice blog post what's…
con-f-use
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