MadBuntu

With all the advances in documetation and UI that ubuntu has gone through in the past decade, man pages are still the best way to get info on various commands.  Manpages.ubuntu.com has the manpages for all the active versions of Ubuntu up in a searchable database.

For my money, I would much rather read manpages in a browser.

Ubuntu Manpages Repository

*What I am waiting for now though is a way to search the manpages by function.  I have to know the command ‘wc’ to search the man pages for how to make it output the number of lines now (’wc -l’). What I would like to see is this ability integrated into manpages.*

IBM developerworks has a ton of useful information.  I recently came across two great and related articles that might be of interest to readers of this blog.  These two articles describe the steps to take you out of the basic command line functionality into power user territory.

The first article “Learn 10 Good Unix Usage Habits“:

• Make directory trees in a single swipe.
• Change the path; do not move the archive.
• Combine your commands with control operators.
• Quote variables with caution.
• Use escape sequences to manage long input.
• Group your commands together in a list.
• Use xargs outside of find .
• Know when grep should do the counting — and when it should step aside.
• Match certain fields in output, not just lines.
• Stop piping cats.

The other article expands on it “Learn 10 More Good Unix Usage Habits” :

• Use file name completion.
• Use history expansion.
• Reuse previous arguments.
• Manage directory navigation with pushd and popd.
• Find large files.
• Create temporary files without an editor.
• Use the curl command-line utility.
• Make the most of regular expressions.
• Determine the current user.
• Process data with awk.