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Get Help With A Command
The --help
argument is a common choice for quickly learning about a command. Particularly useful, --help
shows the arguments for that particular command so we don’t have to look them up online.
Another option is the whatis
command, which prints a one-line description of the command.
Quickly Describe A Command
whatis mkdir
mkdir (1) - make directories
mkdir (2) - create a directory
Note that in this case there are two mkdir commands with slightly different descriptions, but you can ignore that.
Get Help With A Command
In this example, we get help for the command mkdir
(make directory).
mkdir --help
Usage: mkdir [OPTION]... DIRECTORY...
Create the DIRECTORY(ies), if they do not already exist.
Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
-m, --mode=MODE set file mode (as in chmod), not a=rwx - umask
-p, --parents no error if existing, make parent directories as needed
-v, --verbose print a message for each created directory
-Z set SELinux security context of each created directory
to the default type
--context[=CTX] like -Z, or if CTX is specified then set the SELinux
or SMACK security context to CTX
--help display this help and exit
--version output version information and exit
GNU coreutils online help: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
Full documentation at: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/mkdir>
or available locally via: info '(coreutils) mkdir invocation'