The info page

The GNU project launched the info pages as an alternative documentation to the man pages. The GNU project once claimed that man pages are outdated and needed replacement and so they came up with the info pages.

You can view the info page of any command by running:

info command_name

For example, to view the info page of the ls command, you can run the info ls command:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ info ls

Next: dir invocation, Up: Directory listing

10.1 ‘ls': List directory contents
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The ‘ls' program lists information about files (of any type, including directories). Options and file arguments can be intermixed arbitrarily, as usual.

For non-option command-line arguments that are directories, by default ‘ls' lists the contents of directories, not recursively, and omitting files with names beginning with ‘.'. For other non-option arguments, by default ‘ls' lists just the file name. If no non-option argument is specified, ‘ls' operates on the current directory, acting as if it had been invoked with a single argument of ‘.'.

By default, the output is sorted alphabetically, according to the locale settings in effect.(1) If standard output is a terminal, the output is in columns (sorted vertically) and control characters are output as question marks; otherwise, the output is listed one per line and control characters are output as-is.

Because ‘ls' is such a fundamental program, it has accumulated many options over the years. They are described in the subsections below; within each section, options are listed alphabetically (ignoring case). The pision of options into the subsections is not absolute, since some options affect more than one aspect of ‘ls''s operation.

The info pages sometimes offer more details compared to man pages. However, man pages remain the most popular go-to destination for help documentation on Linux.