In much of the above discussion there is only a hint of how some of the useful programs work for you to make using a Linux system possible. The Debian system comes with much ``on-line'' documentation. It is Debian Policy that every program has a man page. In addition, many packages also provide info pages.
How does this help when you may not even know the command name? Linux also provides the apropos command. If you give apropos a word, it will search certain portions of the man pages looking for that word. For instance the command:
apropos printer
will produce output something like:
banner (6) - print large banner on printer
lpc (8) - line printer control program
lpd (8) - liner printer spooler daemon
lprm (1) - remove jobs from the line printer queue
pac (8) - printer/plotter accounting information
print (3ncurses) - ship binary data to printer
printcap (5) - printer capability data base
Thus apropos can lead you to the man page entry for the topic of interest. In the previous list the command lpc looks interesting, and we didn't discuss it when talking about printers. This program is mostly of interest to the System Administrator, but that could be you, so take a look at the man page by entering the command:
man lpc
The man program will format text to your screen through the pager assigned to that task (the default is more). man recognizes the PAGER environment variable, and will use the pager defined by this variable. Many people prefer less to more as far as pagers are concerned, they think less is better than more. (Dwarf agrees: less is more) If you only wish to set this for your own account, add the following lines to /.bash_profile:
PAGER=less
export PAGER
and the next time you login man will use less as the pager.