8.4 Getting Information about a Command

Many of the commands available to the Linux shell can seem cryptic to begin with. To find out detailed information about what a command does and how to use it, use the man command specifying the name of the command as an argument. For example, to learn more about the pwd command:

$ man pwd

When the above command is executed, a detailed description of the pwd command will be displayed. Many commands will also provide additional information when run with the --help command-line option:

$ wc --help