Administration Resources
A system administrator requires minute details and help to hold out the job of system administration successfully.
The Manual Pages
The very famous rejoinder Read The Fine Manual (RTFM) refers to the manual pages that are installed on (hopefully) every Unix system. The man pages, as they are often called, instructions and contain documentation on each Unix command, data file on the system and C function call.
The man command searches for documentation that is based on a command or topic name. then the command
man ls
gives the documentation on the ls command.
In fact, the man pages have a sophisticated structure. The pages are separated into sections, with a few of the sections being additionally separated into subsections.
The section layout resembles the subsequent methods
- User commands-commands like tar, ls, and cpio
- System calls-C programming functions that are considered system calls, such as opening and closing a files
- C library functions-C programming functions that are not considered system calls, such as printing a text
- File formats-descriptions of file layouts, like inetd.conf and hosts.equiv
- Headers, Tables and Macros-miscellaneous documentation, like as header files and character sets, not already covered
- Games and Demos- demo software and games. (Even Doom for Unix has a man page!)
This is a generalized table of contents. A System V and BSD begins out with slightly different section schemes and vendors tend to add their own sections and make their own "improvements."