How to find what a specific option does with a command

josecolella · 03-12-2012, 05:32 PM

I have a quick question, I use the man pages a lot, and I was wondering whether there was a quick way to find what a specific option does with the command...example...lets say I'm programming in C and I want to use the -g command with gcc, instead of looking through the entire man file, is there a way to directly go to where I need?...

eSelix · 03-12-2012, 05:50 PM

I think not, but you can use search ability of man, by pressing slash key "/" and entering regular expression to find. And for most programs there is a brief help after "--help" argument: "some_command --help".

chrism01 · 03-13-2012, 12:01 AM

If you also have access to a web browser, an HTML version is http://linux.die.net/man/, which is easier to search.
I'm sure there are other sites with that info, as well as specialist sites for eg gcc http://gcc.gnu.org/

deep27ak · 03-13-2012, 05:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by josecolella

I have a quick question, I use the man pages a lot, and I was wondering whether there was a quick way to find what a specific option does with the command...example...lets say I'm programming in C and I want to use the -g command with gcc, instead of looking through the entire man file, is there a way to directly go to where I need?...

If you don't want to go through the long list of man pages then you can try this

Code:

#gcc --help

it will list you the swicthes you can use with gcc with brief description

David the H. · 03-13-2012, 02:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by eSelix

...but you can use search ability of man, by pressing slash key "/" and entering regular expression to find.

To be more specific, the search features are provided by the pager or text reader that displays the page, not the man command itself. On most distros this is less by default.

josecolella · 03-14-2012, 03:06 AM

Thank you for your help, by the way when I mentioned the gcc, I just meant to show an example...with any command a quick way to find what an option does....Thank you all for your help...