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essential-manpages

The Most Important Manpages​

As an appendix, or printed reference, list of the top ten manpages?

  • man re_format (macOS, BSD) or man 7 regex (Linux) - basic and extended regex patterns
  • man test is an excellent way to quickly check common tests (existence of a file etc)
  • man set is super useful when checking options like set -ex in scripts
  • man getopt
  • man XXX show signal commands (Ctrl+V etc)
  • man bash search for ARITHMETIC\ EVALUATION to find how arithmetic operators work in bash
  • man bash search GRAMMAR for pipelines, if statements, conditionals, loops, lists and so on
  • man bash search for ^EXPANSION to see all shell expansion operators
  • man bash search for ^INVOCATION to find details on startup and the startup files that are read
  • man bash search for ^[ ]+shopt to find descriptions of shell options

Essential Bash Manpages

ManpageSearchDescription
man bash^PROMPTINGDetails on how to set the PS1 prompt.

Essential Z-Shell Manpages

ManpageSearchDescription
man zshmiscPROMPT\ SEQUENCESDetails on how to set the PS1 prompt.
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