[balug-talk] don't know which command handles what you're interested in

[Joe Brenner]

Michael Paoli <Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu> wrote:

> > I find it's a minor problem with the Debian way of doing things
> > that in advance you don't know which command handles what you're
> > interested in, so you don't know which man page to start with.
> 
> Isn't that pretty much the case for Linux/UNIX/BSD in general?

Yes, if not computers in general (I was just helping a roomate set-up
her User Friendly macintosh recently, and there didn't appear to be
any way to find a web browser if you didn't know that Apple had named
theirs Safari.)

Anyway, you've supplying some good general answers here on how to
research an issue like this, but I actually knew something about it
already -- I knew about "dpkg", "apt-get", "apt-cache", "apt-file",
"aptitude", and the more obscure "wajig".  It just didn't occur to me
that the feature I wanted might have been built-in at the dpkg level.
I kept looking over the options on "apt-get" and "aptitude" and so
on...

> The "trickiest" part is often guessing what keywords would likely be
> present in the man page names and descriptions.  

True.  For example, I wasn't sure if "cloning" was any where near the
right term for what I wanted to do.  So I gave up on the web searches,
and hit the balug-talk list...