I was wondering what is the reason that i can type : man hier and this will give me the man page about the command but if I type : hier the command is not found ?
Because
hier is not a command. The
hier(7) manualpage explains the layout of the filesystem hierarchy, nothing more. You can somewhat notice this by its number;
7 means:
Code:
3. FreeBSD Library Functions Manual
7. FreeBSD Miscellaneous Information Manual
See
man(1) for more information on that. As you can see
3 is used by libraries which is why you can't do much with
gethostname. If you check its manualpage closer you'll see why this is so:
Code:
SYNOPSIS
#include <unistd.h>
int
gethostname(char *name, size_t namelen);
int
sethostname(const char *name, int namelen);
See?
gethostname is a so called function which you can use in your C programs by including
unistd.h, then you'll have access to the function.
FreeBSD's manualpages don't merely cover commands, they also include system information, config files, libraries, and some even merely explain parameters. For example take a look at
ports(7).
This is why it's important to know about the different sections. Commands such as
man and
apropos can be used to check for things in those sections. For example, lets say you're looking for a command to tell you the hostname:
Code:
peter@zefiris:/home/peter $ apropos -s1 hostname
hostname(1) - set or print name of current host system
geoiplookup(1) - look up country using IP Address or hostname
geoiplookup6, geouplookup6(1) - look up country using IP Address or hostname
logresolve(1) - Resolve IP-addresses to hostnames in Apache log files
ypwhich(1) - return hostname of NIS server of map master
By telling
apropos to only search section
1 I managed to limit the output to general system commands only. If I hadn't....
Code:
peter@zefiris:/home/peter $ apropos hostname | wc -l
29
... I'd have gotten lots of information which would be totally useless for me.
Hope this can help
