Good afternoon!
Any unix, linux book will give you a good hint on posibilities.
Many linux books have discussions of rpm related stuff, fewer discuss apt..just to pick on two obvious distinctions. Right now, I'm a Debian guy. I'm studying Debian Linux. For now, I'm only interested in Debian commands.
If you need a comprehensive list of manuals, man pages is the closest one, ithink
You are correct. However, to search the man pages means that you already know the command to start with. What I'd like to do is to be able to say something like this "Hey, why is my drive/sound card/video card doing this?", then find a site that lists the commands that are drive-/sound card-/video card-related so that I can decide what might be run from the CLI to diagnose/fix/optimize/etc.
A (poor) analogy follows: You go to Mexico/China/Portugal. You are leaving the departures lounge. A local says something to you. Seriously, are you going to grab a fellow traveller and demand a translation...each and every time a local says something to you? Of course not. You'll whip out a dictionary and grunt through what the local chap is trying to say and what you'll say in return. Only when that fails will you consider grabbing an expert to explain the nuances of the conversation. Much more efficient and much less time consuming than having the entire departure lounge chanting back at you "No, "clear" will clear your screen, "cls" won't. At least, not in this country."
If you know what do you want to do, and think is programable, then I think your best bet is google for it, or ask on list.
In many ways, one of the many purposes of the lists is to act as a very basic low-level interpreter between a user and the computer. Too much, maybe. I think that list traffic would be reduced somewhat and a user's grasp of what is available to him/her would be increased, if there was one place ( a dictionary?) that folks could go to at least learn the vocabulary of Debian that is available to them BEFORE hitting up the list experts.
My question is: "Is there such a web-site?"
There's a huge, in the thousands, of comand line programs on any linux installation, and most people dont know how to use them all, if any,
Wouldn't it be nice if there was a place where ALL the commands are available to peruse either before a command is needed or when a command is needed?
so it's better to know a command when you need it, than diving in the man pages withthe hope of learning how to work CLI.
That's right. But a newb can't "know" and understand a command if he/she doesn't know it exists. And no one can dive into the man pages without knowing what they are looking for in the first place. Catch-22!
Rob