Ubuntu Unleashed 2019 Edition: Covering 18.04, 18.10, 19.04

(singke) #1

To list the PCI devices attached to your system, use the following:


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matthew@seymour:~$ lspci


For an interesting, high-level listing of system information, use this:


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matthew@seymour:~$ neofetch


Reading Manual Pages with man


It’s time for a much-needed mental break, and the man command is easy to
use. Most people use only the topic argument, like this: man gcc. However,
two other commands that work closely with man are very useful: whatis
and apropos.


The whatis command returns a one-line description of another command,
which is the same text you get at the top of that command’s man page. Here is
an example:


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matthew@seymour:~$ whatis ls
ls (1) - list directory contents


The output explains what ls does and also provides the man page section
number for the command so you can query it further.


The apropos command takes a search string as its parameter and returns all
man pages that match the search. For example, apropos mixer returns
this list:


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alsamixer (1) - soundcard mixer for ALSA soundcard driver
mixer (1) - command-line mixer for ALSA soundcard driver
aumix (1) - adjust audio mixer


So, you can use apropos to help find commands and use whatis to find
out what a command does.


One neat trick is that many of the tips and tricks you learned for less also
work when viewing man pages (for example, using / and ? to search). This is
one of the beautiful things about UNIX systems: Gaining knowledge in one
area often benefits you in other areas.


You can use a number of other commands to search the file system, including
the following:

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