The CLI flows through Linux

The Linux command line offers various options to help you be more productive and find your way around the unfamiliar environment.

For instance, many commands and utilities support a --help option that displays information about its supported options. For example, the rm --help command will print the various options supported by the rm command along with their description and brief usage instructions.

Similarly, most command-line utilities also bundle a formal piece of documentation known as the manual page and usually referred to as its man page.

The command man mkdir will bring up the man page for the mkdir utility. There are also a couple of helpful utilities that can extract brief information from a man page. For example, the

whatis command displays a very brief description of a command from its manual page that’s usually enough to gauge the purpose of an unfamiliar utility. Then there’s apropos that looks for a string inside a man page’s name and description sections. It comes in handy when you can’t remember the right command for a particular task. For example, apropos "split a

zip file" will point you to the zipsplit utility that helps you split a ZIP file into smaller ZIP files. You can then read through its man page to get familiar with its syntax and usage.