Man Man

"man man" is one of the fun commands to do your first time in Unix. "man" is a tool which displays the "man page", a text page containing summary help for a Unix command, configuration file, or API. For example, "man ls" will tell you all about the "ls" command. "man man", which gives you the man page for the man command, has an amusing eat-your-own-tail character.

Unfortuately, man pages in Linux are somewhat deprecated in favor of the more heavyweight "info" pages (some man pages now say "This is old, out of date stuff. See the info pages for the real documentation"). Info pages are spiffy, but they aren't as easy to use. And in AIX, IBM adds so much extra stuff to the default man pages that some AIX sysadmins don't install the man pages at all.

CategoryUnix