How to take help in CentOS 9

Now we will talk about how to take help in CentOS 9. There are two main commands to take help in CentOS 9 from command line. It is one of the important learning in Linux as wherever you get stuck, You just cannot rely on google all the time.

Also, not every solution is easily available on web and it won’t be from official documentation.

So, lets start from our first command to get a help from official documentation. We are taking useradd command to show the help commands. Let’s assume we don’t know anything about useradd command.

1. –help or -h

This is the most easiest way to get help for any command as it gives the brief description of a command with all the options available for that command. You can use it when you want to solve your query as quickly as possible or you just forget the proper option for that command.

Syntax for help command: (command) -h or (command) –help

For Example, useradd -h will show you the below page.

You can choose any option out of it according to your task requirement. It is just the minimal information to remind you the options for your commands. If you want to choose the shell of your user at the time of creating a user, You can go for useradd -s /bin/bash akash

The above command will create a user called akash with a shell access of bash shell. This is the first command to take help in CentOS 9.

2. Man

Man command stand for manual of a command just like the manuals we use to get in the box of new tv, fridge, oven etc. We generally don’t use to read those manuals but when something goes wrong with our product, the first thing we check is help from that manual book. Same goes with the command manual.

We can take all the help in full details from man command. For some of the commands there are examples at the last of man page that you can check for real scenarios.

Syntax for man command: man (command)

For Example, man useradd will show you the below page.

You can use the full manual by using the arrow keys to make it up and down for reading the man page. Also, to quit the man page of a command you can press q on your keyboard.

3. info

info command stands for information of a particular command that you want to know. It is another one of the easiest way to know things in Linux. In some of the commands, info pages use to have more detailed information than a manual page. Any new person can remember info or help whenever that person is stuck to take help in CentOS 9.

You can read the full information on info page with the help of up and down arrow keys. You can come out of the page by pressing ctrl+c key.

I will also add one bonus thing for new and old Linux learners.

4. yum whatprovides

yum whatprovides helps you to know actual bundle name of a package. In easy language, It help in installing the software that we need by finding its real bundle name. For example, I want to check my IP Address information and ifconfig command is not working because it is not available in my system. We will use yum whatprovides ifconfig to know the bundle name to install.

We can see here that net-tools-2.0-0.62.20160912git.el9.x86_64 provides ifconfig command. We can install net-tools to get ifconfig in our system.

That’s all for the taking help in CentOS 9.

You can follow us on Instagram for more updates.

You may like our other posts:

Yum Configuration

How to use ls command

FAQ on how to take help in CentOS 9