This my first post following my week long Redhat Monitoring and Performance Tuning Course (RH442). This course was rather intense and dealt mostly with concepts and theories rather and was not at all a how-to on performance tuning. I am going to do my best to document some of what I learned.  Lets start with the documentation…

Man Pages, are the extensive documentation that comes installed by default on a linux system. They are seperated into 9 books or sections.

1. General Commands
2. System Calls
3. C Library Functions
4. Special FIles and Drivers
5. FIle Formats
6. Games/Screensavers
7. Protocols
8. System Admin Commands and Daemons

To access a particular book you specify the book name after the man command. For example:

#man 1 printf

which is different than…

#man 3 printf

To find all the man pages related to printf, you run a the following

#man -k printf

Which gives you the output below listing all man pages related to printf. These specific ones are all on the the printf command specifically. Similarly you can use the apropos command and get the same output

To see only the man pages for printf run the command below

#man -f printf

Which will return only what you see below.

printf (1)           – format and print data
printf (1p)          – write formatted output
printf (3)           – formatted output conversion
printf (3p)          – print formatted output