The most comprehensive documentation on FreeBSD is in the form of manual pages. Nearly every program on the system comes with a short reference manual explaining the basic operation and available arguments. These manuals can be viewed using man:

where command is the name of the command to learn about. For example, to learn more about ls(1), type:

The online manual is divided into numbered sections:

In some cases, the same topic may appear in more than one section of the online manual. For example, there is a chmod(1) user command and a chmod() system call. To tell man(1) which section to display, specify the section number:

This will display the manual page for the user command chmod(1). References to a particular section of the online manual are traditionally placed in parenthesis in written documentation, so chmod(1) refers to the user command and chmod(2) refers to the system call.

If the command name is unknown, use man -k to search for keywords in the command descriptions:

This command displays a list of commands that have the keyword “mail” in their descriptions. This is equivalent to using apropos(1).

To determine what the commands in /usr/bin do, type:

or

FreeBSD includes many applications and utilities produced by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). In addition to manual pages, these programs may include hypertext documents called info files. These can be viewed using info(1) or, if editors/emacs is installed, the info mode of emacs.

To use info(1), type:

For a brief introduction, type h. For a quick command reference, type ?.