Security-Oriented C Tutorial 0x0A - Man Pages

Dec 22, 2015 01:04 AM

Okay guys and gals, this will be a quick tutorial on using the incredibly helpful man pages.

What Are Man Pages?

Man pages are manuals for tools and functions which are provided for the *nix operating systems. These pages detail the syntax, usage and options for the queried function or tool and can be used by anyone in any situation, not just necessarily for C.

Using Man Pages

To obtain a man page for a certain function or tool, you can type the following command:

man [function or tool name here]

Here are two examples on the scanf function (found in stdio.h) and the wc tool we have used before.

Code snippet showing a terminal command for `man scanf`.

Security-Oriented C Tutorial 0x0A - Man Pages

Terminal command line showing the command "man wc" in a Linux environment.

Conclusion

Now that you know how to pull up man pages for functions, you will need to rely on this skill whenever I use a function that you have never seen before. This means that I will no longer explain what a function does if we have never encountered it. If you still don't know what the function does, try Googling it for an explanation or an example. After unsuccessfully attempting to find out what it does, only then should you ask someone or leave a comment down below.

dtm.

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