Man pages
Thomas Cameron
thomas.cameron at camerontech.com
Fri Dec 30 19:24:04 UTC 2005
On Fri, 2005-12-30 at 14:53 +0000, Joao Paulo Pires wrote:
> Man pages - Each time I try get some help from man pages I get
> disappointed. Wich is the proper way to learn some more from console?
> If I call --help I just get confused. Am I dummy? I think the first
> way to learn should be the man pages. I can imagine this is a basic
> need for a newbie. TIA, Joao.
Please don't post HTML to this list. There are a lot of people on this
list who use mail readers which don't support HTML.
In answer to your question, I usually do a Google search for examples.
Let's say I want to use Samba, and the man pages aren't helpful. I
would do a Google search and enter the words "samba" and "example" in
the search field. The very first hit would bring up John Terpstra's
excellent web page titled "Samba-3 by Example."
If I was interested in, say, Postfix, I would Google for "postfix" and
"example." Again, the very first hit is "Postfix Standard Configuration
Examples" on the Postfix web site.
A search on "apache" and "example" also brings up a bunch of examples of
how to solve specific problems.
I can also get more granular. Let's say I specifically want to know how
to set up greylisting on Sendmail as a milter. My search terms would be
"greylist," "sendmail," "milter," and "example." The very first hit is
an article by Emmanuel Dreyfus, the author of milter-greylist, titled
"Spam Filtering with Sendmail Milters and Greylisting."
So really, the first answer is probably Google, not the man page. Once
you are familiar with the essentials of a program, you would go back and
reference the man pages for the finer points.
Hope this is helpful,
Thomas
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