Learn how to answer your own questions

Learn how to answer your own questions. Tips from the Geeks.
How many times have you had a linux question, and the first thing you do is run to
your local Linux Guru. They will growl at you before answering your question. But
you really didn't know, so you wonder why they were a little testy. You also wondered
what RTFM meant.
Well here it is. The way to answer your own questions without having to bother your
local Guru or users group. This might even save you time.

These tips have been tested for several years by Linux Guru's and Geeks. They work.
These are the real steps that Linux Guru's use to answer questions.

1. Read The Fine Man pages
Man pages were written by the people who actually wrote the programs. These people
know what they are talking about.

HINTS
o
man -k (subject)
If you arn't sure which manpage to look at, you might want to do a man -k. man
-k searches through all of the manpages on your system for whatever you tell it.
o
konqueror
For those people with KDE installed, konqueror is a great man page reader. The
shortcut for this is to use #. So if you wanted to see the man page on man pages,
you would type #man into the place you would usually put a web address.
o
Not all man pages are created equal.
Some of them are terrific, and have all the information you need. Some of them
only seem to be there because there always has to be a man page. If you come
upon a man page that is terrible, you will probrubly want to skip down to the next
step.
2. Read the Info or Doc pages
Some programmer prefer to put their documentation in a Info page, or some other type of
document, such as a web page.

HINTS
o
rpm -ql (package) | grep doc
rpm -ql (package) | grep -i info
Sometimes you just don't know where these documents are. They should be in
the packages doc directory. The above commands will let you know where the
doc directory is for whatever package you have questions about.
o
konqueror
For those people with KDE installed, konqueror is a great Info page reader. The
shortcut for this is to use info:. So if you wanted to see the Info page on Info
pages, you would type info:info into the place you would usually put a web
address.
3. Do a google search
Google is your friend.
4. locate, which, rpm -qf
If you know the name of a program you run, but don't know what rpm package it is from,
this is how you find out.
o
locate (anything) : This is the fastest way to find a file on your machine
o
which (anything) : Get the full pathname for a program that you usually just type
the programs name, such as ssh.
o
rpm -qf (filename) : Find out what rpm package a file came from, if it did come
from a rpm package.
5. yum provides (filename)
Sometimes you don't know what rpm package something is in, and it isn't installed on
your machine. 'yum provides' searches through all the rpm packages, both on your
machine, and in the yum repositories, looking for any file that matches.
6. yum search (subject)
Sometimes you aren't searching for a file, just a subject, such as video, or dvd. 'yum
search' searches through all the yum repositories looking at the descriptions of all the
packages to see if the any of the descriptions match what you are looking for.
7. Go to the developers website
Now this actually should have come up when doing a google search, but I have seen it
occasionally where the developers site isn't on the top page. So incase you haven't already
done this step, do it now.

HINTS
o
rpm -qi (package)
rpm -qi give alot of information about a package, including the web page of the
package.

创建人: dawson