The man command gives access to Unix manual pages and is a source of information about individual Unix utilities.

If you know the name of a Unix command or utility such as od at the command prompt type:

$ man od
     

A partial display of the output:

OD(1)                            User Commands
          OD(1)



NAME
       od - dump files in octal and other formats

SYNOPSIS
       od [OPTION]... [FILE]...
       od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]
       od   --traditional   [OPTION]...   [FILE]   [[+]OFFSET[.][b]
       [+][LABEL][.][b]]

DESCRIPTION
       Write an unambiguous representation, octal bytes by default,
       of  FILE  to standard output.  With more than one FILE argu-
       ment, concatenate them in  the  listed  order  to  form  the
       input.   With  no  FILE,  or  when  FILE is -, read standard
       input.
       ...