Anyone using Linux will at one point or another need to look up how to use a particular command. The age-old favorite ‘man’ command (short for manual) comes in handy for green lads and grizzled veterans alike. The variety of applications that can be made using simple commands is astounding, with a bit of creative attributing – a term I just now made up referring to the use of the many attributes that make each command flexible.

Here’s this week’s Linux tip.

man -k keywords

Instead of just browsing the manual one page at a time looking at commands, run an in depth search for the command you are looking for. Also particularly useful when you don’t know what command you are looking for…

Running the following command generated a list of all the manual pages with consecutive string of letters – xml – in the command: 

man -k xml

Hope this helps.