In this chapter, we have made several reference to man pages. Man pages, which is short for manual pages, are how software is documented on Unix and Unix-like systems. You can find a wealth of information about applications, system calls, libraries, and even various abstract concepts. Understanding how to use man pages is an important concept for any Linux developer; therefore, let's look at how to use them by looking at the man page for the pcap_findalldevs()
function. We will need to open a terminal prompt and use the following command:
man pcap_findalldevs
Once you run this command, you should see something similar to the following screenshot:
To scroll through the page, you will use the up and down arrow keys, and to exit the page, simply press the
q
key. If you need help, press the
h
key. There are a number of other commands, but that will be enough to get you started. A man page may contain several sections, but almost all of them start with the NAME
, SYNOPSIS
...