HELP(1) | General Commands Manual | HELP(1) |
help
— help for
new users and administrators
This document is meant to familiarize new users and system administrators with OpenBSD and, if necessary, UNIX in general.
Firstly, a wealth of information is contained within the system
manual pages. In UNIX, the
man(1) command is used to view them. Type
man man
for instructions on how to use it properly.
Pay especially close attention to the -k
option.
Other OpenBSD references include the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) located at https://www.openbsd.org/faq/, which is mostly intended for administrators and assumes the reader possesses a working knowledge of UNIX. There are also mailing lists in place where questions are fielded by OpenBSD developers and other users; see https://www.openbsd.org/mail.html.
System administrators should have already read the afterboot(8) man page which explains a variety of tasks that are typically performed after the first system boot. When configuring any aspect of the system, first consider any possible security implications your changes may have.
After logging in, some system messages are typically displayed, and then the user is able to enter commands to be processed by the shell program. The shell is a command-line interpreter that reads user input (normally from a terminal) and executes commands. There are many different shells available; OpenBSD ships with csh(1), ksh(1), and sh(1). Each user's shell is indicated by the last field of their corresponding entry in the system password file (/etc/passwd).
man
man
command for
detailed information on what it does and how to use it.pwd
cd
cd /
to change the
working directory to the root.ls
ls -l
for a detailed
listing.cat
cat
filename will print the contents of a plain-text
file to the screen.vi
vi
filename. See also
mg(1).mkdir
mkdir
dirname.rmdir
rm
chmod
cp
mv
ps
ps -auxw
, which will display information
about all active processes.kill
date
mail
exit
When a command is entered, it is first checked to see if it is
built-in to the shell. If not, the shell looks for the command in any
directories contained within the PATH
environment
variable (see environ(7)). If the
command is not found, an error message is printed. Otherwise, the shell runs
the command, passing it any arguments specified on the command line.
Shell built-in commands do not have their own manual page, so it's necessary to read the manual page for the user's shell. Tools such as which(1) and “whence”, a ksh(1) built-in command, can be used to see what commands are being executed.
csh(1), ksh(1), man(1), whatis(1), whereis(1), which(1), afterboot(8)
This manual page was written by Aaron Campbell <aaron@openbsd.org> and first appeared in OpenBSD 2.6.
July 13, 2017 | OpenBSD-current |