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I just installed Windows Subsystem for Linux for the first time and downloaded the Debian distribution from the Windows Store.
The first thing I tried to do was use the "mv" command. The second thing was to run "man mv" because I don't remember how to use it. But I received the error:
-bash: man: command not found
It looks like the package I want is called manpages. But I can't install that:
sudo apt-get install manpages
[sudo] password for pi:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package manpages is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source
E: Package 'manpages' has no installation candidate
How do I get the man command up and running?
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You can find man pages on the web. Just type man and the name of a command into your favorite search engine, and you'll get plenty of hits.
To use man , you type man on the command line, followed by a space and a Linux command. man opens the Linux manual to the “man page” that describes that command—if it can find it, of course.
The man (short for manual page) tool uses the less program to display information about a particular command. The usage is very simple; you just type man, followed by the command you want to find out more about. For example, to get more information about the ls command, you can type man ls.
man doesn't really have an equivalent in the DOS and Windows NT world. The closest equivalent was help command, which in DR-DOS 5.0 and later and MS-DOS 6.0 and later would look up command in a database of help pages and display the page.
Q1. How to use man command? The basic usage of man is very simple - just run the command with the name of the tool whose reference manual you want to access. Q2. How to make man display manual page from specific sections?
In case you want the man command to search and list manual pages by considering input as a regular expression, you can do that using the -k command line option. Here's the output the above command produced on my system:
For example, man (1) refers to the entry in section one of the manual describing the man command. In the image above, you see a reference to man (7). This means there’s more information about man in another section. When we first opened the man page, it displayed man (1).
We get this question often, and not to worry; exiting the man command is extremely easy and it’s universal, meaning you can quit man the same on any unix OS that includes the feature, whether that is Mac OS, Mac OS X, linux, BSD, or otherwise. Just press “q” key to quit out of a man page.
apt update to update the local package lists followed by apt install man-db to install the actual package.
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