Man pages

Man pages are great resources of information. The man pages that come with OpenBSD are especially of use because of their excellent quality.

Useful to beginners:

  • help(1) – help for new users and administrators
  • hier(7) – layout of the OpenBSD directory structure
  • afterboot(8) – things to check after the first complete boot
  • man(1) – display manual pages
  • ls(1) – list directory contents
  • less(1) – view text files
  • kill(1) – terminate or signal a process
  • ps(1) – show process status
  • top(1) – display and refresh information about the (top) CPU processes
  • ftp(1) – FTP program (client)
  • lynx(1) – Text-based webbrowser

Useful to intermediates:

  • afterboot(8) – things to check after the first complete boot
  • netstat(1) – show network status
  • dmesg(8) – display the system message buffer
  • find(1) – walk a file hierarchy
  • locate(1) – find filenames quickly
  • sh(1) – public domain Bourne shell
  • grep(1) – search for patterns in files
  • mount(8) – mount file systems
  • df(1) – display free disk space
  • du(1) – display disk usage statistics

Useful to more advanced users:

  • route(8) – manually manipulate the routing tables
  • ifconfig(8) – configure network interface parameters
  • fstab(5) – static information about the filesystems
  • xargs(1) – construct argument list(s) and execute utility
  • awk(1) – pattern-directed scanning and processing language
  • dd(1) – convert and copy a file
  • strings(1) – print the strings of printable characters in files
  • options(4) – miscellaneous kernel configuration options

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