Ubuntu Terminal command dir
 

Hi there. It is my first post here. I am new to Linux. I run Windows 7, installed a Virtual Box and Ubuntu as a Guest OS. I just tried to use dir command. Help dir says that I can use two parameters which are rather important to me because they improve the visual assessment of the directories. They are -p and -v. They do not work. Either parameter does nothing promised in the help. The directories are supposed to be printed each on a separate line. They are still printed on one line with short space between them. Why? Thanks.

Could you post a screenshot of the output, please?
You can take a screenshot with the command If you don't have scrot installed, type

Redd9, many thanks for the reply. Well, I installed scrot as you suggested and ran it. And what is next? Where is the screen image? Sorry about it. The dir -p and dir -v clearly do not work as far as I can see.

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.

The help command displays information about the shells built in commands and help dir displays information about the directory stack command (dirs) vs the dir command located in /usr/bin. The man pages are the is the on line manual for find helping on a particular command. Look at man help. The linux command for viewing file and directories is ls (man ls).

Press q to exit man.

Some additional information about what you are trying to accomplish might be necessary, homework?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page

OK, I found the .png file which should contain an image file (screen image). The problem is how to get it out of the VM and post here. I don't have a bidirectional connection between the VM and the host OS.

Hi there. It seems I took a screen image (with my own software) and posted it in attachment to this post. But where is the attachment? It is a big question.

I do not think I provided a clear explanation...

In a nutshell you are looking at documentation for one command but executing another. The bash shell which is what you are using in a terminal window has built in commands. help dir displays documentation for the built in dirs (directory stack) but in reality you are executing /usr/bin/dir.

I'm not sure what you are wanting, why not use any of..
or scroll up and down after
See
If you need help with man pages, read

Thank you guys. It is an unfamiliar territory to me. I am on a learning curve.

We were all newbies once.

About dot com has a good set of tutorials on Linux and you can find a wealth of resources at The Linux Documentation Project.

You can also find a lot of tutorials on YouTube; search for the topic you are interested in.

Michaelk, "Some additional information about what you are trying to accomplish might be necessary, homework?" What a strange thought! I am wondering what makes you think so? I am very curious. At my age? I am here not for self-disclosure, so this makes me even more intrigued.

I strongly recommend you bookmark and read this very good tutorial on the cmd line http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz

Just go:


From the man page
AUTHOR
Written by Richard M. Stallman and David MacKenzie.