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Development Tools Introduction to the Terminal Common Commands The Manual

Is there a version of the 'man' command that works in Git Bash on Windows?

Most of the Unix commands work on Git Bash, but the 'man' command does not, and it seems very useful. Any alternatives or work-arounds?

5 Answers

the command is usually help like the following

help history will print the info needed to use the command a set if instructions and even the syntax after all that it will simply return a new prompt waiting for more input and then you can go ahead and use what you just learned

It looks like this still doesn't have an answer. It would be great if someone at Treehouse could chime in with a possible solution.

I don't have a solution myself but I did find this alternative called 'tldr' which can be installed using npm like this npm install -g tldr

Henry Blandon
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Henry Blandon
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Graduate 21,521 Points

I think the best way is to use the workspace provided by treehouse. You can launch workspace by clicking launch workspace button at the bottom right corner of the video. second you can create a virtual machine with linux or just simply use an online playground. I used the following and it works fine. https://www.katacoda.com/courses/ubuntu/playground you can use it without creating an account.

justlevy
justlevy
6,325 Points

For Windows, I use PowerShell. I had to update my help modules.

Update-Help doesn't work unless you have admin privileges. I also believe that you need to run the command and install in a specific directory (C:\Windows\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules).

For example, on Windows PowerShell try these commands: help ls -online or man ls.

See this link and information below:

Update-Help requires administrative privileges in PowerShell 6.0 and below. PowerShell 6.1 and above set the default Scope to CurrentUser. Prior to PowerShell 6.1, the Scope parameter was not available.

You must be a member of the Administrators group on the computer to update the help files for the PowerShell Core modules.

To download or update the help files for modules in the PowerShell installation directory ($PSHOME\Modules), including the PowerShell Core modules, start PowerShell by using the Run as administrator option. For example: Start-Process pwsh.exe -Verb RunAs.