The most comprehensive documentation on FreeBSD is in the form of man pages. Nearly every program on the system comes with a short reference manual explaining the basic operation and various argument. These manuals can be view with the man command. Use of the man command is simple: man command where command is the name of the command you wish to learn about. For example, to learn more about ls command type: % man ls

The online manual is divided up into numbered sections: User commands System calls and error numbers Functions in the C libraries Device drivers File formats Games and other diversions Miscellaneous information System maintenance and operation commands in some cases, the same topic may appear in more than one section of the on-line manual. For example, there is a chmod user command and a chmod() system call. In this case, you can tell the man command which you want by specifying the section: % man 1 chmod which will display the manual page for the user command chmod. References to a particular section of the on-line manual are traditionally placed in paranthesis in written documentation; so chmod(1) refers to the chmod user command, while chmod(2) means the system call.

This is fine if you know the name of the command and forgot how to use it, but what if you cannot recall the command name? You can use man to search for keywords in the command descriptions by using the -k switch: % man -k mail With this command you will be presented with a list of commands that have the keyword `mail' in their descriptions. This is the same as the separate command apropos.

You are seeing all those fancy commands in /usr/bin, but don't even have the silliest idea what most of the names do actually stand for? Simply do a % cd /usr/bin; man -f * or % cd /usr/bin; whatis * which is the same. GNU Info files

FreeBSD includes many applications and utilities produced by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). In addition to man pages, these programs come with more extensive hypertext documents called info files which can be viewed with the info command or, if you installed emacs, the info mode of emacs. To use the info(1) command, simply type: % info For a brief introduction, type h, and for a quick command reference, type ?.