"View Man" ...whoops what have I done?

B

bossa nova

Registered
Maybe somebody can tell me what I have done.

I was trying to view the the manual for a command and when I typed "Man" and the command I thought would exist nothing happened. So I tried a bunch of different terms that might mean the same thing to see if I could find what I wanted. Well I typed "view man" and now I seem to be stuck in something that has no command line. I tried control-c and several other commands that might get me out and I seem to be stuck.

I am going to check and see if I can get the process number and force quit it. But I would really like to know where I took myself to. Anybody got any ideas?

tia..
John
 
What you wanted was "man command" as in:

man cd

which would give you the manpages.

You used the "view" command which is vi in read-only mode. Type ctrl-z to background it, then you can do:
ps -aucx | grep view
to get the PID
then do:
kill PID
(put the proper number in for PID) to kill it.
Me, I use less to view files and pico for simple text editing. emacs and vi are both hard to use, whereas pico is very very very (very) simple. For more advanced editing, I use BBEdit.
 
Ok...I figured it out. Looks like I got into the Vi editor. I looked up the process number and killed it. Boy isn't learning the terminal fun?
 
wyvern...yeah it looks pretty complicated. Now I understand why there are entire books on editors. I wasn't looking to use Vi I was actually trying to do something else but since you suggest pico is pretty simple maybe I will start with that one when I am ready.

Thanks!
 
Yup, go ahead and give pico a try. All the commands you need are there on the screen (the ^ means control, btw, so ^x = ctrl-x).
 
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